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HESITATIONS 



HESITATIONS 

THE AMERICAN CRISIS 
AND THE WAR 



BY 

WILLIAM MORTON FULLERTON 

AUTHOR OF "problems OF POWER" 




It is high time to leave a policy of expedients, of opportunities, of entangle- 
ments and crooked ways, of parliamentary hypocrisy, concealment, and com- 
promise that characteri/xs the languid life of worn-out nations, and return to the 
virgin, loyal, simple, logical policy that derives directly from a moral standard, 
that is the consequence of a ruling principle, that has always inaugurated the 
young life of peoples that are called to high destinies. 

— Mazzini, "To the Italians." 

Neutrals are almost always sacrificed, and peace is usually concluded at their 
expense. — Ancieni maxim of tht Princes of the House of Savoy. 

He who, in circumstances so critical, is incapable of foreseeing the future has 
not the right to assume the responsibilities of public office. 

— Venizblos, Speech, Oct. 21, 1915. 



Garden City New York 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1916 



■ F? 



Copyright, igi6, by 
DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 

All rights reserved, including that of 

translation into foreign languages, 

including the Scandinavian 



OCT 18 i916 



ICI.A438920 
/ 



PREFACE 

On September 7, 19 14, the German Emperor 
wrote to President Wood row Wilson asking him 
for "an impartial opinion" with regard to the 
war which had broken out in Europe five weeks 
before. 

On October 8th the Dutch papers reproduced 
from the North German Gazette Mr. Wilson's reply 
to the imperial feeler. Mr. Wilson had read the 
Emperor's letter "with the greatest interest and 
sympathy," and he declared that he was "honored" 
at being the object of such a missive. He prayed 
God that the war would soon come to an end, and 
remarked cautiously and sententiously that later 
on there would be a "day of settlement." "Where 
injustices have found a place," he said, "results 
are sure to follow, and all those who have been at 
[v] 



PREFACE 

fault will have to answer for them/' He demurred 
to forming and uttering a definite opinion. Such 
action, he urged, would be injudicious and even 
precipitate. Speaking, therefore, "as friend to 
friend," he informed the German Emperor — who 
had just sacked Belgium, and whose aviators were 
then dropping bombs over the statue of Napoleon 
in the Place Vendome — that he could not doubt 
that the Emperor would understand if he " reserved 
his opinion until the end of the war, when all events 
and circumstances could be regarded in their proper 
perspective and correct bearings." 

The American people had not "reserved" their 
opinion. Their ignorance as to European condi- 
tions has always been profound, but the crime of 
Germany in violating the neutrality of Belgium — a 
crime confessed by the German Chancellor — and 
Germany's atrocious methods of making war 
among an innocent folk, instantly aroused through- 
out the United States feelings of horror and of 
reprobation. 

[vi] 



PREFACE 

I was in the United States from mid-November, 
19 14, to April, 191 5, frequenting Americans of every 
class and of every type in the large towns and vil- 
lages throughout the vast region from the Atlantic 
seaboard to the lake cities of the Middle West. I 
lectured on the causes of the war and on its signifi- 
cance for the United States in schools, colleges, and 
universities. The students of Andover, Yale, Prince- 
ton, and Harvard, the bankers and clubmen of New 
York, the manufacturers and the social world of 
Buffalo and Cleveland, the chance acquaintances 
in the promiscuous company one met in the " smok- 
ers " of the great express trains, every one with whom 
I came into contact, every one, as I recall, without 
a single exception, declared his stupefaction at the 
conduct of Germany and his corresponding sym- 
pathy for the cause of the Allies. It was obvious 
that there were many millions of Americans who, 
however glad that the United States was not at 
war, were in no doubt as to the entire culpability 
of Germany, and as to the innocence of France and 
[ vii ] 



PREFACE 

England and Russia. In the music halls and streets 
one heard, as often as "Tipperary," the doggerel: 

I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier, 

I brought him up to be my pride and joy. 
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder. 
To kill some other mother's darling boy? 
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles. 
It's time to put the sword and gun away. 
There'd be no war to-day 
If mothers all would say, 
" I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier!" 

And nothing, no doubt, could be more characteristic 
of the heedless pacificism of our community than 
this popular protest against the very idea of war. 
But at the same time it was clear that the instinctive 
sentiment of America, in the early months of the 
war, vibrated frankly and articulately with the 
hearts of those peoples who were supporting the 
shock of the aggression of Germany. And Belgium 
and France and Serbia were already learning that there 
was nothing platonic about American sympathy. We 
were already many millions, those of us whom the 
[ viii ] 



PREFACE 

President of the Republic was to brand, a few months 
later, almost as with a bull of ex-communication: 

There are some men among us and many residents 
abroad who, though born and bred in the United 
States and calling themselves Americans, have so 
far forgotten themselves and their honor as citizens 
as to put their passionate sympathy with one or 
other side in the great European conflict above 
their regard for the peace and dignity of the United 
States. They also preach and practise disloyalty. 
No laws, I suppose, can reach corruptions of the 
mind and heart, but I should not speak of others 
[the Pan-German conspirators on American soil] 
without also speaking of these, and expressing the 
even deeper humiliation and scorn which every self- 
possessed and thoughtfully patriotic American must 
feel when he thinks of these things and the discredit 
they are daily bringing upon us.* 

This is a strange document. It is certainly one 
of the strangest in our annals. In Switzerland, 
where racial divisions are more clearly accentuated 
even than in the United States, reciprocally con- 
trary sympathies were manifested at the outset 

*"Annual Message," December 7, 191 5. 
[ix] 



PREFACE 

of the war, and the Federal Council, which, like the 
Government of the United States, had neglected to 
protest against the violation of the neutrality of 
Belgium, took certain natural precautions in order 
to arrest any movement injurious to the harmony 
of the Federal body politic. But the Swiss idea of 
liberty is very different from the American idea; 
it is bound up with the notion of Federalism. Swiss 
pacificism is based on Swiss preparation for war. 
Swiss neutrality is, no doubt, guaranteed by treaties; 
it is guaranteed, above all, by the rifle of the Swiss 
mountaineer. On January i, 191 5, M. Motta be- 
came President of the Swiss Confederation, and it 
is a suggestive lesson in Comparative Politics to 
read his declarations to the deputy for Geneva, M. 
Edouard Chapuisat, in connection with the utter- 
ances of his Presidential cousin in Washington:* 

The divergencies of sympathy and opinion that 
have appeared in Switzerland, if you examine them 

*"La Role de la Suisse," by Edouard Chapuisat (p. loi) 
(Chapelot, 1916). 

[x] 



PREFACE 

without passion, are quite explicable. Natural 
affinities, personal relations, predisposed certain 
minds in favor of one or other side, even before 
they had examined the question in its political as- 
pects. But observe how, after all, notwithstand- 
ing the different races that live on our soil, our 
country is united. Is not that, indeed, the evident 
proof that, in order to form a people, it is necessary 
to lift, over and above questions of race, a common 
ideal, visible to all eyes? 



In contrast with this statesmanlike utterance of 
the Swiss President, the passage cited from the 
Annual Message of the President of the United 
States has a theocratic and even curiously un- 
American ring. It is not an easy task to explain 
how a Head of the State at Washington could ful- 
minate futile anathemas like this. That, however, is 
exactly the all but impossible task I have undertaken 
in this book. Mr. Wilson's conception of "neu- 
trality," its causes and its consequences, this is the 
subject of the present volume. That the Great 
War was bound to bring to the surface a long latent 
[xi] 



PREFACE 

crisis in the domestic as well as in the international 
affairs of the United States; that no policy of 
"studied aloofness," to use the expression of Westlake, 
could satisfactorily deal with it; and that "there is 
nothing morally exalted in the position of neu- 
trality "* seemed to me to be the things best worth 
saying to one's compatriots in the early days of 
the war. This conviction rooted itself more and 
more deeply in my mind in proportion as the action 
of the agents of Doctor Dernburg, insolent em- 



*"There is nothing morally exalted in the position of neutrality 
and the panegyrics that we too often hear poured out upon that 
happy condition of comparative comfort are not altogether de- 
served. It has long since been recognized by publicists that if 
we were to admit any standard of justice in the affairs of nations 
the one side or the other in most wars must be right in the main; 
to abstain from participation in a just war could not, with decent 
regard for the opinion of mankind, be based upon indifference to 
the result, but must be predicated upon the conviction that 
warlike effort on the part of the neutral nation would be so fraught 
with injury and peril to its own interests as to justify it in ab- 
staining from participating in the conflict. That dry old utili- 
tarian, Jeramy Bentham, thought the test to be whether the 
good gained by entering the conflict was offset by the harm to 
be done humanity." — From "Neutrality — Permanent Difficulties 
and Present Perils," by Hon. Frederic R. Coudert; published by 
the Law Academy of Philadelphia, 191 5. 

[xiil 



PREFACE 

issary of the Wilhelmstrasse, became more efficient, 
and as the character of our crisis became more 
appalling. I could not but recall certain pages 
that I had written twenty-two years before: 

Englishmen, educated wisely for generations in 
liberty and self-reliance, and amidst that collection 
of rights called free institutions, were able in America 
to work out their own salvation without even the 
amount of fear and trembling that is prescribed and 
that one might have thought necessary. Suddenly, 
however, representatives of races without the habits 
of self-reliance, and unpracticed in the technique 
of practical government, invade the country, and 
the first scientific result is a swamping tidal wave. 
. . . America of the last thirty or forty years 
bears scarcely any resemblance to the original Eng- 
lish New England. She has taken a step from which 
now there is no going back. She is selling her 
original birthright for a conglomerate mess of 
pottage, in which "Irish stew," "mulligatawny 
soup," "corn bread," "sauerkraut" and "lager 
beer" are staple ingredients. The modern America 
of the States is entering upon certain social prob- 
lems absolutely new to it. These problems must 
be settled by methods for which she will not be 

[ xiii ] 



PREFACE 

able to find any precedent in her English traditions. 
For her earlier history, indeed almost for the first 
two centuries of her history, the phenomena with 
which she had to deal were distinct, definite, what 
the scientists call isolated, and therefore com- 
paratively simple. The complicated tangle of 
those that now exist is so very perplexing that she 
may well tremble at the problem of unravelling 
it. . . . Constitutional Government in England 
has been self-government in leading strings. The 
early colonists in America were largely English- 
men, with all the English training, who believed that 
under favorable conditions the leading strings could 
be snapped. They were perfectly right. But they 
who builded the house no longer sit at the head of 
the table, and all about the board is a motley throng. 
What is to be the nature of the remaining courses 
of the banquet or the quality of the after-dinner 
wine and speeches, he must be either a clever school- 
boy or a wise prophet to suggest.* 

These verities, a quarter of a century ago, were 
patent only to a few. The World War was to ren- 
der them commonplace to the general. If it were 



*" Patriotism and Science," pp. 109- 1 13 (Roberts Bros., Boston. 
1893). 

[xiv] 



PREFACE 

possible to contemplate that war solely from an 
American angle, no American patriot could regret 
the war, for it is difficult to see how, without the 
shock produced by that war, our national unity 
could be looked forward to as a certainty, and as 
a certainty not too remote. 

W. M. F. 
Paris, June g, 1916. 



I XV] 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Preface v 

Introduction xix 

CHAPTER 

I. The First Reactions OF Washington. 3 

II. Incompetent Stewardship .... 19 
The Doctrine of Monroe and the War 
The Hague Treaties and the War 

III. American "Neutrality" .... 46 

The Reciprocal Misunderstanding of 

Two Continents 
Immigration and the Unity of the 

United States 
German Interference in the Affairs of 

the United States 

IV. Action of the Government of the 

United States 92 

The Submarine Controversy 
Collision Between the President and 

Congress 
A Political Victory and a "Diplomatic 

Victory" 

V. Consequences of the Action of the 

- Government of the United States 141 
The Future Foreign Policy of the 
United States 



INTRODUCTION 

The history of the World War is almost entirely 
a history of hesitations. The word "hesitation" 
provides a convenient key to most of the war's 
mysteries. Germany willed the war and for years 
had been preparing it. But England's "hesitation" 
to do the one thing needful — make Germany under- 
stand that she was not afraid of war, and stood 
shoulder to shoulder in arms with France, not only 
in the week preceding the invasion of France, Bel- 
gium and Luxembourg, but during the four or five 
years before the fatal August of 19 14 — caused the 
particular war that occurred just when that war 
occurred. On the other hand, if France and Russia 
and Italy, prudently pacific Powers, had not chroni- 
cally "hesitated" ever since 1904, in face of wanton 
German aggression, a World War would have come 
[xix] 



INTRODUCTION 

earlier than it did. Again, after the Great War 
broke out, the record of the nations, great and 
small, has been a series of continued stories of 
"hesitations." 

But there are "hesitations" and "hesitations." 
The sole problem for the historian is to arrive at a 
clear statement of the nature of these hesitations. 
Each nation has had its own reasons for delay, its 
own special and often tragic decisions to make as 
regards neutrality or active participation. The 
blow dealt by the hammer of the German Thor, on 
the 2nd of August, 19 14, was so astounding that 
the impact was felt in every country of the planet. 
The account of how the nations reacted constitutes 
almost the entire subject matter of any adequate 
history of our time. The immediate reactions of 
France and Russia; the less immediate and hesitant, 
yet definitive, reaction of England; the hesitation 
of Italy during a period of nine months; the hes- 
itation for more than a year of the Balkan Powers; 
the singularly interesting hesitations of the United 

[XX] 



INTRODUCTION 

States — all these long delays, readjustments, pro- 
crastinations, belated decisions, slowly dissipating 
illusions are so many separate chapters in the most 
interesting record of historic psychology that human 
annals have to show. 

The chapter of the hesitations of the United 
States is not one of the least instructive, nor, in 
spite of appearances, is it one of the least explicable. 
The United States was the only Power, with the 
exception of Italy, that took, during the war, a 
decision to which she was not constrained by forces 
beyond her own control. The stand which she 
eventually made was a belated one, it was an in- 
adequate one, and it would have been well for her 
higher interests if she had made even that inadequate 
one earlier. Why she did not make it earlier; what 
she might have done, and what, indeed, had she 
been adequately informed and properly guided, 
she would have done, will form the subject of the 
present book. 

[xxij 



HESITATIONS 



HESITATIONS— THE AMERICAN 
CRISIS AND THE WAR 

CHAPTER I 

THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

WE ARE eighteen full moons on the hither 
side of the most monstrous cataclysm 
that has ever befallen human society. 
Yet in the middle of July, 1914, so tranquil were all 
the political seismographs in Europe that statesmen 
and crowned heads were joyously planning their 
annual outings at Vichy, Hombourg, Aix, and the 
North Sea fiords. That the World War which had 
been maturing since 1904, the date of the Franco- 
British Entente, would come before 1917, every z*^ 
one of the gentlemen so peacefully packing their 
trunks for a quiet holiday in the midsummer of 
191 4 knew full well. But meanwhile they had the 

[31 



HESITATIONS 
full conviction — there was perhaps a single ex- 
ception, the far-sighted French statesman who 
then represented his country in Berlin — that they 
could look forward to at least one agreeable autumn 
more. Two weeks later the world saw — ^what it 
saw! The European Continent was defiled under 
its inhabitants. The very earth seemed to reel 
to and fro like a drunkard. The moon was con- 
founded and the sun ashamed. Louvain and 
Malines and Dinant were in ashes. An entire 
nation had been, not carried away into exile unto 
the waters of Babylon, but hunted from its soil 
towards an asylum in the friendly land of France, 
by the waters of the British Channel. The Great 
Powers of the Western Hemisphere looked on pity- 
ing and aghast, but silent — and magnificently 
neutral. To many a European we seemed to be 
maintaining the classical impartiality of Pilate. 

Had not the President of the United States him- 
self struck the note? Had he not, as early as August 
1 8th— the date of the official neutrality proclama- 
[4] 



THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

tion was August 4th — assuming the leadership of 
the American people which constitutionally belongs 
to him in that plebiscitary Republic, defined Amer- 
ican neutrality as a political neutrality, affecting 
not merely the international relations of the United 
States, and even as a neutrality of soul, a neutrality 
of sentiment, a neutrality of opinion? "It is en- 
tirely within our own choice what the war's effects 
upon us will be," said the President, with a naive 
optimism, blind to the real character of the fated 
event that had just shivered the planet, blind, above 
all, to the beauty of the opportunity thus thrust 
upon the United States to consolidate her vital 
interests, and to justify throughout the world the 
renown of her peculiar birthright. He said : 

I speak a solemn word of warning to you against 
that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach 
of neutrality which may spring out of parti- 
sanship, out of passionately taking sides. The 
United States must be neutral in fact as well as in 
name during these days that are to try men's souls. 
fVe must be impartial in thought as well as in action, 

[5] 



HESITATIONS 

must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as 
upon every transaction that might be construed as 
a preference of one party to the struggle before an- 
other. 

Evidently this was terribly unambiguous counsel. 
But it was the kind of responsible utterance that 
excellently facilitates the task of the historian. 
Words are a subtle instrument, but it is a fearful 
fate for a literary artist to become the victim of 
words. The President of the United States solemnly 
warned his compatriots against taking sides, rec- 
ommended them even to be " impartial in thought." 
He was oblivious of the fact that this warning and 
this recommendation were the proof that he him- 
self had no doubt that " impartiality " was possible, 
even in thought, before the hideous spectacle of 
such a series of collective crimes on the part of a 
bewitched mob of human beings calling itself a 
civilized people as history had never recorded, and 
had never even expected to record. " My thought 
is of America," declared Mr. Wilson; but the 
[6] 



THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

"America" of which he was thinking was not the 
''America" of the past, ignorantiy supposed in 
Europe to be the only "America," nor yet the 
"America" of the future — ^the rapid construction 
and fusioning of which the unexpected European 
war now happily rendered possible — but the 
heterogeneous "America" of the immediate present, 
the latent reactions of which at such an hour were, 
no doubt, a terrifying notion to harbor and on 
which to meditate. How terrifying let the Presi- 
dent himself declare on his own responsibility: 

The people of the United States are drawn from 
many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at 
war. It is natural and inevitable that there should 
be the utmost variety and sympathy of desire among 
them with regard to the issues and circumstances of 
the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others an- 
other, to succeed in the momentous struggle. It 
will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay 
it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a 
heavy responsibility; responsibility for no less a 
thing than that the people of the United States, 
whose love of their country and whose loyalty to its 

[7l 



HESITATIONS 

Government should unite them as Americans all, 
bound in honor and affection to think first of her 
and her interests, may be divided in camps of 
hostile opinions, hot against each other, involved 
in the war itself in impulse and opinion, if not in 
action. Such diversions among us would be fatal 
to our peace of mind, and might seriously stand in 
the way of the proper performance of our duty as 
the one great nation at peace, the one people hold- 
ing itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation 
and speak the counsels of peace and accommoda- 
tion, not as a partisan, but as a friend. 

Thus, there can be no manner of doubt as to 
President Wilson's state of mind at the outbreak of 
the war, none as to his policy, none as to the motives 
of his policy. He meant to keep the American 
people out of war ("neutrality"); and his main 
reason was his fear with regard to what he eu- 
phemistically called destruction of the "peace of ^ 
mind " of his compatriots. His method, as will be 
seen, was not to bring "peace of mind" nor any 
other form of peace, but meanwhile the President 
urged on American citizens physical, intellectual, 
[8] 



THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

and moral restraint in regard to the war. This 
attitude is all the more striking as the President^ 
in his neutrality proclamation of August 4ih, dang- 
ling a bait before his compatriots, had expressly 
stated that "the free and full expression of sym- 
pathies, in public and private, is not restricted by 
the laws of the United States." He appealed to 
their most characteristic sentiments, pointing out 
the attractions of that ideal privilege which, in all 
sincerity, he reminded them would be the reward of 
their prudent behavior if they took the best of care 
to tell nobody what they were thinking. He ap- 
pealed to the humanitarian and Christian tradi- 
tions and impulses of the idealistic American people, 
assuring them that later on they would have ample 
time for "the proper performance" of their duty, 
as being the one great nation at peace: they could 
then play their beautiful part of impartial mediation 
and " speak the counsels of peace and accommoda- 
tion" (sic). 

"Counsels of accommodation!" The President 
[9] 



HESITATIONS 

knows his classics and he is aware that there are 
always possible "accommodations" with Heaven. 
But, by the declaration just cited, he did whatso- 
ever within him lay to prevent the American people 
from recalling that there are no legitimate "ac- 
commodations" with Hell, none with crime, even 
though the crime be international. As the war 
proceeded the American President was to learn 
many a lesson, he was even to learn this particular 
one. But meanwhile — having waited some two 
weeks after the outbreak of the war to determine 
the national conduct of the United States, and 
having neglected, as will be seen, to take for his 
country the statesmanlike attitude which, while 
safeguarding her privilege abroad, would have 
baffled in advance all the obstacles which he was so 
wantonly creating for himself and for the American 
people — meanwhile he seemed to repeat the sayings: 
"Let the dead bury the dead" and "Sufficient unto 
the day is the evil thereof." Moreover, the date of 
the Presidential "Annual Message to Congress" 

[lO] 



THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

was even now looming on the horizon. Rural 
credits, charting of the Alaska coast-line, self-govern- 
ment for the Filipinos, the Mexican question, were 
paramount matters in comparison with which the 
questions of the military preparedness of the United 
States and of the great World War might really 
be thrust into the background. As to that war, was 
not the only safe policy, perhaps, just what the 
President had defined it to be: an impartial attitude 
of present indifference, to be rewarded by ultimate 
mediation? It was, at all events, an apparently 
convenient policy, and, unquestionably, it was cap- 
able, in view of the peculiarities of American society, 
of plausible justifications. 

The American people generally believed it to 
be the great good fortune of the United States that, 
by grace of the Monroe Doctrine, it could balance 
on the "fine poise of undisturbed judgment," it 
could enjoy, as regards all European matters, the 
high and convenient privilege of neutrality. Why 
disabuse them? Infinitely small and distinguished 
[n] 



HESITATIONS 

was the minority that were aware that this opinion, 
so widely held, could no longer be safely cherished. 
But even that minority would not contest the 
"sacred egoism " of the President, the high political 
prudence of Mr. Wilson's reminder that political 
neutrality with regard to the war was, for the United 
States, natural, advisable, and perhaps necessary. 
The domestic peace of the United States demanded 
it. Let, then, the "Annual Message" bloom, as 
flowers bloom in halcyon climes. On December 
8, 1 9 14, while the Belgians and the French and the 
British were fighting the battles of Flanders, the 
newspapers of the United States contained the full 
text of the President's annual report to the American 
people on the state of the nation, and it was in calm 
and comforting terms that Mr. Wilson spoke of the 
United States of North America: 

We are at peace with all the world. No one who 
speaks counsel based on fact or drawn from a just 
and candid interpretation of realities can say that 
there is reason to fear that from any quarter our 

[12] 



THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

independence or the integrity of our territory is 
threatened. Dread of the power of any other 
nation we are incapable of. We are not jealous 
of rivalry in the fields of commerce or of any other 
peaceful achievement. We mean to live our own 
lives as we will; but we mean also to let live. We 
are, indeed, a true friend to all the nations of the 
world, because we threaten none, covet the possess- 
ions of none, desire the overthrow of none. Our 
friendship can be accepted, and is accepted without 
reservation, because it is offered in a spirit and for a 
purpose which no one need ever question or suspect. 
Therein lies our greatness. We are the champions 
of peace and of concord. And we should be very 
jealous of this distinction which we have sought to 
earn. Just now we should be particularly jealous 
of it, because it is our dearest present hope that this 
character and reputation may presently, in God's 
providence, bring us an opportunity such as has 
seldom been vouchsafed any nation, the opportunity 
to counsel and obtain peace in the world and re- 
conciliation and a healing settlement of many a 
matter that has cooled and interrupted the friend- 
ship of nations. This is the time above all others 
when we should wish and resolve to keep our 
strength by self-possession, our influence by pre- 
serving our ancient principles of action. 

[13] 



HESITATIONS 

Evidently the President was still cherishing in 
December his pious, inspiring, and touching illusions 
of the first two weeks of the war. He had done 
nothing to affirm the indignation of the American 
people against Germany's outrageous violations of 
the law of nations. He had failed to " serve man-\ ) 
kind " in the nick of time. He would serve it pres- 
ently. He had the "dear present hope" that, "in 
God's providence," the United States would shortly 
enjoy an honor "such as has seldom been vouch- 
safed to any nation." He defined his supineness of 
the past months and of the present hour in the 
phrase: "preservation of our ancient principles of 
action." And meanwhile he would take careful 
note not to forget to send William 1 1 the customary 
birthday greeting. The watchword in England, 
too, even in England, was "Business as usual." 
The question presses: "Was this attitude of the 
President of the United States due to ignorance, or 
was it due to lack of character? Or was it an in- 
stance of incomparable statesmanship?" 
[14] 



THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

The scrupulous scrutiny of the facts, of the docu- 
ments in the case, can alone suggest an answer to 
these questions. But meanwhile, it is of the high- 
est importance to record and to note that, at one in 
the afternoon, on August 6th, — ^four days after the 
invasion of Luxembourg by Germany, and some 
ten days after a British Admiralty order at mid- 
night O^ily 26th) forbidding the First Fleet, then 
concentrated at Portland, to "disperse for manoeu- 
vre leave for the present" — the United States 
Secretary of State instructed the United States 
ambassadors in Europe to inquire whether the 
several European governments were willing to 
agree " that the laws of naval warfare as laid down 
by the Declaration of London of 1909 should be 
applicable to naval warfare during the present 
conflict in Europe"; and that the United States 
Government added that, in its opinion, such an 
agreement "would prevent grave misunderstand- 
ings which might arise as to the relations between 
neutral Powers and the belligerents." It is im- 

[15] 



HESITATIONS 

portant to record and to note that, although six- 
teen days later Germany stated that she would 
apply the Declaration of London, "provided its 
provisions were not disregarded by other bellig- 
erents," the United States Government, two months 
later (October 24th), informed all the Foreign 
Oifices of the belligerent Powers, save that of Eng- 
land, that its suggestion as to the adoption of a 
temporary code of naval warfare was withdrawn, 
"because some of the belligerents were unwilling 
to accept the Declaration without modification." 
The United States Government therefore insisted 
"that the rights and duties of the Government 
and citizens of the United States in the present war 
be defined by existing rules of international law 
and the treaties of the United States," and the 
Government reserved to itself "the right to enter 
a protest or demand, in every case in which the 
rights and duties so defined were violated, or their 
free exercise interfered with by the authorities of 

the belligerent governments." 
[16] 



THE FIRST REACTIONS OF WASHINGTON 

It was, then, true that Washington had taken 
certain precautions, and that these precautions, so 
far as they went, could be not inaccurately described 
by the phrase in the "Annual Message": "preser- 
vation of our ancient principles of action." But 
could the maintenance of a stray clause or two of 
the existing rules of international law, admirable 
as that purpose was as an ideal, be regarded as quite 
satisfying the President's claim to be "keeping 
American influence" by preserving the "ancient 
principles of action " of the American Government 
and the American people? This was a question 
which was instantly put, not only by all Europeans, 
but by an immense number of United States citi- 
zens. It was a question which they who knew the 
facts as to the origins of the war, as well as they 
who knew the " ancient principles of action " of the4~> 
United States of Washington and Madison and 
Jefferson, of Lincoln, of Cleveland, and of Root and 
Roosevelt, were bound to put. It is necessary 
to consider, therefore, with some detail, certain of 
[17] 



HESITATIONS 

the fundamental "ancient principles of action" 
characterizing the tradition of the United States 
in international relations. It is necessary, at all 
events, to study the Doctrine of Monroe and the 
conventions of the Hague Conferences in con-« 
nection with the problems with which Mr. Wilson 
was so inconveniently confronted in the autumn 
of 1914. 



[18] 



CHAPTER II 

INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

The Doctrine of Monroe and the War — The Hague 
Treaties and the War 

WHEN Mr. Wilson, who is an historian of 
great learning, penned in his "Annual 
Message " to Congress the eloquent pass- 
age that has been cited, it is not unlikely that he 
recalled the immortal " Farewell Address " of Wash- 
ington. Washington found himself in 1793 face to 
face with responsibilities and a problem singularly 
resembling those that confronted his successor of 
1 91 4. The young Republic of France had just de- 
clared war against Prussia and Austria, and the 
heroes of Valmy had prefigured the glories of the 
armies of the Third Republic in 1914 on the battle- 
fields of the Marne. Europe was on the brink of a 
[19] 



HESITATIONS 

cataclysm all but equalling in magnitude that 
which we are now witnessing. Napoleon was in 
being, and the world was to be torn with war for 
more than twenty years. Washington made a de- 
liberate examination of the situation, and on the 
22nd of April, 1793, proclaimed the neutrality of 
the United States. That neutrality he maintained 
with moderation, perseverance, and firmness, and 
three years later, in the famous Message to our 
people known as his " Farewell Address," he made 
a remarkable apology of his action. "With me," 
he said, "a. predominant motive has been to en- 
deavor to gain time to our country, to settle and 
mature its yet recent institutions, and to progress 
without interruption to that degree of strength and 
consistency which is necessary to give it, humanly 7 
speaking, the command of its own fortunes." 

Thus, Washington declared and maintained Amer- 
ican neutrality in 1 793 in order to further American 
unity, without which, in his view, it would be im- 
possible for our country to secure "command of its 
[20] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

own fortunes." "Union," on Washington's lips, 
meant no mere suppression of sectionalism, not 
merely the cooperation of North and South and 
East and West; it meant a really organic consensus 
of minds and hearts, making us worthy of the name 
of nation. 

No one, indeed, ever dwelt more eloquently than 
Washington on the immense value of our national 
union for our collective and individual happiness. 
National union he called "the palladium of our 
political safety and prosperity." And when, in 
the same Farewell Address, he said that the name 
of "American" "must always exalt the just pride of 
patriotism more than any appellation derived from 
local discriminations"; when, addressing his country- 
men, he said: "You have, in a common cause, 
fought and triumphed together; the independence 
and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils 
and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and 
successes," he would have recoiled before the vision 
if he had foreseen the vast, heterogeneous American 

[21] 



HESITATIONS 

world of the Twentieth Century, in which the new, 
unassimilated millions of immigrants, who have not 
shared "the common dangers, sufferings, and suc- 
cesses," are menacing that traditional moral unity 
which is the chief mark of nationality. 

The truth is that the United States is, in certain 
altogether essential respects, less of a nation to-day 
than it was when Washington penned his famous 
political testament, or than it was even a quarter 
of a century ago. But while a host of alien in- 
fluences have been corroding many of the most 
characteristic of our national traditions the condi- 
tions on the European Continent, and even in Asia, 
have been reviving there the spirit of nationalism; 
and we Americans, no longer isolated in our Western 
Hemisphere, are face to face with a host of problems 
which we fondly fancied we should never have to 
solve. 

It was possible for Washington to declare in 1796 
that Europe had a set of primary interests which 
have only a very remote relation to us, and that, 
[22] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

therefore, it would be unwise in us to implicate 
ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissi- 
tudes of European politics, or the ordinary combi- 
nations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. 
But the globe has been steadily shrinking, and it is no 
longer true, as it was one hundred and twenty years 
ago, that, to use Washington's words, "our detached 
and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue 
a different course" from the nations of the Euro- ,. 
pean Continent. For our situation is no longer "de- 
tached and distant." We may already, if we like — 
that is, if we prepare ourselves properly — defy 
material injury from external annoyance; we may 
become strong enough, if we will, to secure scru- 
pulous respect for any neutrality that we may re- 
solve upon. 

But in this modern world, whether we wish it or 
no, our destiny has become interwoven, not with 
that of any particular part of Europe, but with 
that of the whole of the planet, and we are no longer 
as much at liberty as once we were to steer com- 
[23] 



HESITATIONS 

pletely clear of those permanent alliances which 
Washington so dreaded. Thus Washington's Fare- 
well Address, like every other human document, 
from the Book of Genesis to the Pact of London of 
September 4, 19 14, must be read in the light of the 
time, and the moment that gave it birth. Even 
less than a quarter of a century later Monroe and 
Madison and Jefferson found themselves face to 
face with an international situation with which they 
were able to deal only by ignoring completely the 
warnings of the Founder of the Republic as to the 
risks of entangling alliances. 

But in the same breath in which Washington 
uttered counsels of prudence, the efficacy of which 
the march of time was bound to modify, he gave 
expression to certain everlasting verities that times 
and seasons cannot alter. "Constantly keep in 
view," he said, "that it is folly in one nation to look 
for disinterested favors from another"; and that 
there can be no greater error than to expect or cal- 
culate upon real favors from nation to nation. "It 
[24] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

is an illusion which experience must cure, which a 
just pride ought to discard." 

What was Washington's conclusion? The ne- 
cessity of what we to-day are calling" preparedness." 
He held that we may safely trust to temporary alli- 
ances for extraordinary emergencies, if we take care 
always to keep ourselves by "suitable establish- 
ments " (Washington's expression for the naval and 
military forces of the country) "on a respectable 
defensive posture." The one object at which our 
national policy should aim, in Washington's view, 
was, in a word, to attain "command of our own for- 
tunes." 

But Washington had not been buried twenty 
years when the Force of Things, the development 
of world events, intervened to impose on our 
statesmen a policy, for the attainment of the " com- 
mand of our own fortunes," which rendered Wash- 
ington's counsel as to temporary alliances obsolete. 
The remarkable triumvirate, Monroe, Madison, 
and Jefferson, on whom had fallen the responsibility 
[25] 



HESITATIONS 

of keeping alight the Vestal fires of our special 
American tradition, found themselves confronted 
with new problems to the solution of which Wash- 
ington's principle had ceased to apply. The world 
situation was now so altered that the interests of 
the United States demanded peculiar readjust- 
ments. The device of "temporary alliances for 
extraordinary emergencies" no longer sufficed. 
The triumvirate of our great statesmen was com- 
pelled — driven by the Force of Things — to consider 
the advisability of a permanent alliance with one of 
those European Powers which our forefathers had 
hastily imagined to be governed by interests radi- 
cally unlike those that would henceforth govern 
American men. What was the fruit of their medi- 
tations? It was the famous decision and declaration 
known as the Doctrine of Monroe. The Monroe 
Doctrine was, in reality, an alliance with Great 
Britain for the defence of the common security of 
our two States. It was, furthermore, an alliance 
inspired by a concern for the very same principles 
[26] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

and ideals which France and England, Belgium and 
Serbia, Russia and, now, even Italy — and, may I 
not say Japan? — are so sublimely defending to-day, 
to their incomparable glory and honor. 

At the outbreak of the war the vast, preoccupied 
American public, as ignorant of European things 
as a Cantal peasant is ignorant of Chilian politics, 
could not be expected to understand the nature of 
the vital interests at stake in the World War; but 
the Washington Government had no excuse for ignor- 
ance. 

It is an urgent duty at this moment of world- 
crisis to draw attention to the great forgotten fact 
of the identical inspiration, say, of a Sir E. Grey 
in 19 1 4 and a Monroe in 1823; and in this connection 
it is impossible to forget the excellent words of Presi- 
dent James Monroe in his Message to Congress 
of December 2, 1823: "The people being with us 
exclusively the sovereign, it is indispensable that 
full information be laid before them on all important 
subjects, to enable them to exercise that high power 
[27] 



HESITATIONS 

with complete effect. . . . It is by such knowl- 
edge that local prejudices and jealousies are sur- 
mounted, and that a National Policy, extending 
its fostering care and protection to all the great 
interests of our Union, is formed and steadily ad- 
hered to." 

Every one has heard of the Bolivar idea which is 
expressed by the phrase "America for the Ameri- 
cans," and is often confounded with the Monroe 
Doctrine. Now, any unbiassed reading of the 
famous Presidential Message of December 2, 1823, 
shows that the motives of the two American states- 
men were wide as the Cordilleras asunder, but that 
the meaning of both Bolivar and Monroe was that 
European monarchical systems based on Divine 
Right must not be suffered to encroach on any 
portion of the Western Hemisphere. The claim and 
implication were that there was incompatability 
between a certain traditional European conception 
of Government and the American idea of Govern- 
ment. The Monroe Doctrine, as well as the Bolivar 
[28] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

idea, was originally directed against a certain form 
of government, and it is a debatable question 
whether in Monroe's mind there was any thought of 
protecting the Latin-American neighbors of the 
United States against the possible encroachment, 
should ever the case arise, of a government, even 
European, that was really representative, and free 
from what Monroe regarded as the taint of the 
Powers of the Holy Alliance. 

The essential point is that there was, as a matter 
of fact, no pretence of arresting an expansion west- 
ward of the world, or even, as a matter of fact, of 
one hemisphere's saying "Hands off!" to another 
hemisphere. The whole point of President Monroe 
was that contact with a certain kind of "political 
system " peculiar to Europe might be dangerous to 
the United States, and could not be regarded with 
indifference. But as time went on and the United 
States grew in power and multiplied its contacts 
with the European nations, American public opinion 
tended to give to the Message of President Monroe 
[29] 



HESITATIONS 

a bearing and a sense which easily appeared both 
absurd and intolerable. Written to deal with a 
certain occasion in world history, it was speedily 
given the monumental rigor of those laws of the 
Medes and Persians that have defied the ages be- 
cause they were inscribed on brick or brass, it is 
true that President Monroe must be held to be partly 
responsible for this misinterpretation of his own 
thought. He himself said, in so many words, that 
in negotiation with Russia with regard to the re- 
spective rights and interests of the two nations on 
the northwest coast of the North American Con- 
tinent, he had seized the opportunity to lay it down 
as a principle that "the American continents, by 
the free and independent condition which they have 
assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be 
considered as subjects for future colonization by any 
European Power." The entire context, as he con- 
tinues, however, conclusively shows that what 
really concerned him was the possibility that, just 
as "the Allied Powers" had "interposed by force in 
[30] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

the international concerns of Spain," they might 
be led to carry such "interposition" farther into 
the continents of the Western Hemisphere where 
circumstances were far from being the same; and 
it was against such "colonization" as that, by such 
Powers as that, that the President protests in 
advance, both on behalf of his countrymen and on 
behalf of "our southern brethren." 

In a letter written to Thomas Jefferson two days 
after the publication of the Message, the President 
says: " I consider the cause of South America essen- 
tially our own." This assurance was made in 
reply to a letter addressed by Jefferson from Mon- 
ticello on October 24th, to the President, in which 
Jefferson had said: "Our first and fundamental 
maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the 
broils of Europe, our second never to suffer Europe 
to intermeddle with Cis-Atlantic affairs." It was 
thus Jefferson who in this document dictated to 
Monroe the idea that "America, North and South, 
has a State set of interests distinct from those of 
[31] 



HESITATIONS 

Europe and peculiarly her own"; that, therefore, 
she should have a "system" of her own, separate 
and apart from that of Europe. Jefferson's point, 
which became Monroe's point, was that Europe was 
bringing forth despotism, while America's object 
was to become a land of freedom. 

But now comes the all-important point. How 
little either Jefferson, or the President he inspired, 
really wished, by such formal declarations as have 
historically become known as the Monroe Doctrine, 
to exclude from proper action in the Western Hem- 
isphere powers that were not despotic in their 
tendency, was clearly shown by Jefferson's subse- 
quent remark: "Great Britain," he said, "is the 
nation which can do us the most harm of any one, 
or all, on earth, and with her on our side we need 
not fear the whole world. With her, then, we should 
the most sedulously cherish a cordial friendship; 
and nothing would tend more to knit our affections 
than to be fighting once more side by side in the 
same cause." Anything, in a word, to wreck or 
[32] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

hamper the manoeuvres of "the lawless Alliance 
calling itself Holy!" To preserve England's friend- 
ship Jefferson forewent even all his ambitions to 
round out the "measure of our political well-being" 
by the acquisition of Cuba, so that the United States 
might sign a declaration to the effect that she had no 
aims for the possession of " any one or more of the 
Spanish provinces," but that she would oppose with 
all her means the forcible interposition of any other 
Power. 

The action of Jefferson and Madison, therefore, 
is seen to be National and American indeed, but 
not in any such sense as crude idealism or a de- 
fective historical spirit and criticism have often 
ascribed to it. It was action for a definite purpose 
taken at a definite time. It is to be interpreted 
in the light of the events of that time. In putting 
forward the ideas adopted by the President Jefferson 
apologized even for the "haphazard" way in which 
he had had to express his views, although he ex- 
pressed the hope that he had perhaps been "contrib- 
[33] 



HESITATIONS 

uting his mite" toward something useful to his 
country. The increment of this "mite," indeed, 
after the grateful Monroe had placed it formally on 
interest in his Message, expanded so rapidly that 
the Monroe Doctrine to-day no longer bears any 
of the marks of contingency. It has become, owing 
partially, as has been seen, to a certain ambiguity in 
the President's phraseology, partially to the mere 
accretions of time, partially to the romantic con- 
sequences of America's geographical isolation, a 
great National American policy which, in spite of 
all its vagueness, Europe — Germany excepted — not 
only no longer calls in question but positively desires 
to see religiously maintained for its own convenience. 
But what constitutes the far-reaching significance, 
for the world of 1916, of the unanimity of Jefferson 
and Madison and Monroe is the fact already hinted 
at: the Monroe Doctrine laid down a common 
policy for Great Britain and the United States in 
their action in the Western Hemisphere in opposition 
to other Powers. The conscientious scrutiny of the 
[34] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

documents, in fact, confirms the view of Sir Theodore 
Andrea Cook who says:* "The Monroe Doctrine 
was clearly meant by its writer, with the concur- 
rence of Madison and Jefferson, to lay down a 
combined policy which England and the United 
States were to follow on the Continent of Amer- 
ica as against all other Powers, a policy which 
might just as well have been given out by Eng- 
land but was announced from Washington, to 
avoid any appearance of dictation by the Mother 
Country." In other words, England was recognized 
by the United States as the defender with her of 
the ideal of liberty, and the Monroe Doctrine was in 
reality the sign of a common resolve on the part of 
England and the United States to protect the West- 
ern Hemisphere against "autocratic aggression" and 
against the extension thither of a "system" which 
might entail the future " colonization " of America 
by certain European Powers that were regarded as 



*"The Original Intentions of the 'Monroe Doctrine.'" — 

Fortnightly Review, September, 1898. 

[35] 



HESITATIONS 

undesirable. How little it has availed to achieve 
this latter end was revealed to the American world 
shortly after the outbreak of the Great War, when 
the attitude adopted by millions of men of German 
extraction, who had successfully "colonized" the 
United States, tended as will be seen to paralyze the 
free decisions of the Head of the State, even render- 
ing normal application of the Monroe Doctrine 
almost impossible. 

The nature of the compact between the United 
States and England was clearly emphasized when, 
later on, by the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, it was 
agreed that neither the United States nor Great 
Britain should have a preponderant control in 
Central America, and that any canal cut from sea 
to sea should be preserved for the use of all the 
world, and its neutrality guaranteed by Great 
Britain and the United States. This Clayton- 
Bulwer Treaty and its consequence, the Hay- 
Bunan-Varilla Treaty relative to the Panama 
Canal, with the corollary concerning the question 
[36] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

of the Panama Tolls, show clearly enough, more- 
over, that Washington has never itself committed 
the extravagant heresy of supposing that it ever 
really meant to formulate — what the Zeitgeist, 
working over the Monroe Doctrine, has nevertheless 
produced — an indefensible principle of National 
policy, apparently excluding from the Western 
Hemisphere, at the ipse dixit of the United States, 
all and every intervention of whatever sort on the 
part of a foreign Power. 

Thus, as Jefferson wrote to the President, was the 
"mighty weight" of England "brought into the 
scale of free government," and a "whole continent 
was emancipated at one stroke." The essence of 
the Monroe Doctrine, in a word, was to register a 
solemn protest against "the atrocious violation of 
the rights of nations by the interference of any one 
in the internal affairs of another." 

Thus, if the President of the United States had 
considered it convenient in 1914, at the outbreak of 
the World War, he might even have taken his stand 
[37] 



HESITATIONS 

on the Monroe Doctrine to protest against the 
violation by Germany of the neutrality of Belgium 
and Luxembourg, and the shades of Jefferson and 
Madison and Monroe would have applauded. By 
failing to protest, President Wilson suffered the 
grandest of the American traditions to lapse. He 
was an incompetent steward of the most sacred , 
interests of the American people. He lacked states-/^ 
manlike presence of mind. Some of the preoccupa- 
tions that blinded him have already appeared on the 
surface of his mind, and have just been recorded. 
Others will become patent as this history proceeds. 
But neglect to utilize the Monroe Doctrine, in 
the spirit of its admirable inspiration — neglect to 
apply it immediately to the insolent and flagrant 
crimes of Austria and Germany, thereby re-affirming 
American prestige in the counsels of Europe, while 
taking a positive stand in defence of those acquisi- 
tions of civilized humanity, that are symbolized by 
the very word "America" — this neglect was not the 
only interesting lapse in the diplomacy of Wash- 
[38] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

ington in 19 14. Washington left to rust in the 
Department of State arsenals other excellent in- 
struments of action. Washington had signed, in- 
deed, at the Hague Conferences certain conventions 
which had suddenly, in 1914, the happiest occasion 
for instant use. These instruments, moreover, were 
just such weapons as a Monroe would have gladly 
utilized. The Monroe Doctrine formulated, urbi et 
orbi, the principle by which the United States meant 
to abide in its dealings with other Powers. It was 
a principle the vital importance of which for the 
United States had been illustrated by nearly one 
hundred years of history ; and it was hardly less im- 
portant for civilization and "humanity." It was 
the will-o'-the-wisp that had lured immigrants for 
a century over the sea to the Promised Land of the 
romantic New World. The essence of the Monroe 
Doctrine, as we have seen, was, in fact, to declare a 
solemn protest against " the atrocious violation of the 
rights of nations by the interference of any one in the 
internal affairs of another." The interest of the 
[39] 



HESITATIONS 

Treaties of the Hague was that they provided the 
most opportune instruments for the reinoculation 
with this "American" essence of the body poUtic 
of the world. 

It was under the direction of Mr. Theodore 
Roosevelt, as President, that the United States 
signed the Hague Conventions, and that statesman 
has not allowed us to forget it.* Mr. Roosevelt 
has exactly the same pretext for expressing his 
righteous indignation against the failure of his 
successor to honor the signature of the United 
States as M. Venizelos, for instance, had to stig- 
matize his sovereign and his successors for breaking 
their faith with Serbia, when Serbia was attacked by 
Bulgaria. Serbia and Greece had signed a solemn 
treaty of offensive and defensive alliance, which 
King Constantine treated on the Prussian " scrap of 
paper" principle. But who has the right to inter- 
pret the sense of a treaty if it be not the author 



*See "America and the World War," by Theodore Roosevelt. 
Scribner, pp. 226-229. 

[40] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

thereof? Happily, as a matter of fact, no "inter- 
pretation" of the Hague Conventions is necessary. 
The text is exceptionally limpid, and it was con- 
cocted solely for just such occasions as the foolhardy 
leaders of Austro-Hungarian and German foreign 
policy provided as a test of its validity when they 
blackmailed Serbia and dashed across the Belgian 
frontier to the cry: "Necessity knows no law." 
The "Convention between the United States and 
other Powers respecting the rights and duties of 
neutral Powers and persons in case of war on land," 
which was signed at the Hague, October i8, 1907, 
which was ratified by the President of the United 
States February 23, 1909, and proclaimed to the 
people of America by the President and Secretary 
of State, February 28, 19 10, begins as follows: 

Article i. The territory of neutral Powers is 
inviolable. 

Article II. Belligerents are forbidden to move 
across the territory of a neutral Power troops or 
convoys, either of munitions of war or supplies. 

[41] 



HESITATIONS 

These articles received the sanction of the civilized 
world, China and Nicaragua alone excepted. The 
German Chancellor, in his famous speech of August 
4th in the Reichstag, acknowledged that Germany 
was infringing international law when she invaded 
Luxembourg and Belgium. By Paragraph 2, Article 
VI, of the Constitution of the United States, "all 
treaties made or which shall be made under the 
authority of the United States shall be the Supreme 
Law of the land." The President, to be sure, can 
make treaties "only by and with the advice of the 
Senate." But ratification of this particular treaty 
had been "advised" by the Senate March 10, 1908. 
The Treaty of the Hague of 1907, was, therefore, a 
part of the Supreme Law of the land, and even if it 
appeared inconvenient to apply it, its application 
was obligatory. That it should not have been 
applied on such an astounding provocation as Ger- 
many's action when she bludgeoned Belgium in 
order to deal a knock-out blow at France and to 
brow-beat the great British Liberal Party into 
[42] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

cowardly neutrality; that, in fact, it should not 
have been waved in air by the knight-errant cham- 
pions of all the American idealisms, the Bryanites, 
the pacificists, and other humanitarians; that it 
should not, at all events, have been calmly sub- 
mitted to one of its co-signatories, Germany, with 
a grave and stinging rebuke by the Chief Magistrate 
of the United States, the Constitutional High Priest 
charged with the safeguard of the Ark of the 
Covenant which contained that famous Message of 
Monroe worm-eaten in its coffer, but now again 
offered the chance of glorious resuscitation; that, 
at such an hour, the ship of state should have been 
left abandoned by the gods, with a bewildered pilot 
in the chart-room, is one of those ironic — though from 
the point of view of American interests, one of 
those tragic — facts of history, which History must 
nevertheless record with as little emotion as pos- 
sible, fully content if it eventually succeed in deter- 
mining the causes and divining some of the con- 
sequences. 

l43l 



A 



HESITATIONS 

The American Government had acquiesced in 
the German treatment of Belgium. One of the 
makers of history, one of the competent statesmen 
of our time, ex-Secretary of State, Senator EHhu 
Root, deHvered on February 15, 1916, a dispassion- 
ate verdict on the conduct of that government. 
It would not be easy to alter a word in the follow- 
ing solemn judgment: "The law protecting Bel- 
gium which was violated was our law and the law 
of every other civilized country. . . . Our 
interest in having it maintained as the law of nations 
was a substantial, valuable, permanent interest. 
. . . The invasion of Belgium was a breach of 
contract with us for the maintenance of a law of 
nations which was the protection of our peace, 
and the interest which sustained the contract justi- 
fied an objection to its breach. There was no ques- 
tion here of interfering in the quarrels of Europe. 
We had a right to be neutral, and we are neutral 
as to the quarrel between Germany and France; 
but when, as an incident to the prosecution of that 
[44] 



INCOMPETENT STEWARDSHIP 

quarrel, Germany broke the law which we were 
entitled to have preserved, and which she had 
agreed with us to preserve, we were entitled to 
be heard in the assertion of our own national right. 
. . . A single official expression by the Govern- 
ment of the United States, a single sentence denying 
assent and recording disapproval of what Germany 
did in Belgium, would have given to the people of 
America that leadership to which they were entitled 
in their earnest groping for the light. It would have 
ranged behind American leadership the conscience 
and morality of the neutral world. It would have 
brought to American diplomacy the respect and 
strength of loyalty to a great cause. But it was 
not to be. The American Government failed to 
rise to the demands of the great occasion. . . . 
Under a mistaken policy it shrank from speaking the 
truth. That vital error has carried into every 
effort of our diplomacy the weakness of a false 
position." 

[45l 



I 



CHAPTER III 

AMERICAN "neutrality" 

The Reciprocal Misunderstanding of Two Conti- 
nents. Immigration and the Unity of the United 
States. German Interference in the Affairs 
of the United States 

THE President of the United States had failed 
to take the step permitting him to plant 
the American ensign on a commanding 
promontory visible from over the top of the sea. 
He had chosen, no doubt unwittingly — and, for the 
reasons which, as has been seen, he made no effort 
to conceal, and which must now be somewhat care- 
fully analyzed — a long, perilous, roundabout route; 
he had adopted a policy of circuitous methods for 
the maintenance of American prestige. 

Europe has its own notions of what the American 
[46] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

flag stands for, and England and France, at all 
events, had long accepted the idea of that symbol 
which American statesmen and the large majority 
of American citizens themselves held. Germany, 
on the other hand, as Admiral Dewey knew at 
Manilla, has never beheld that flag unfurled on the 
high seas or at the entrance of the American ports, « 
or at the Kiel regattas, without regarding it as a 
challenge and being tempted to treat it with de- 
rision. Proclamation of American "neutrality," 
coupled with the inaction of Washington at the 
moment of Germany's brutal assault on public law, 
this was a spectacle for which neither France nor 
England was prepared, but which could in no wise 
surprise Germany. Germany, indeed, was bound to 
welcome it as a proof that she was about to reap 
the fruit of that intensive cultivation of the Ameri- 
can soil which she had been so diligently sowing with 
seeds of dissension and rebellion during the last 
quarter of a century. 
Among the Allies who were fighting not only 
[47] 



HESITATIONS 

to defend their own soil against aggression, but also 
in defence of the liberties of Europe and of all those 
ideals of free government which the world had al- 
ways associated with the name of America, there 
was profound disappointment, almost bitter dis- 
illusionment. No one expected the United States 
to declare war, actively to take sides. Every one, 
on the other hand, was mystified by Washington's 
failure to seize the event, even if only in its own 
interests, to protest against the pretension of any 
Power to substitute Force for Right in international 
relations. Both France and England were aware 
that the steady flow of immigration to the United 
States during the last twenty-five years had strangely 
altered the character, as well as the aspect, of the 
great American community. But they had been 
optimistically assured by Americans that the meta- 
morphosis of the European soul under the pressure 
of the American atmosphere took place with an 
astounding rapidity. They believed — what is, speak- 
ing generally, quite true — that the specific signs of 
[48] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

nationality, caste, profession, are obliterated by the 
hallmark of "Americanism," and they saw no reason 
for believing that the United States had bartered 
her peculiar ideals and traditions for any mess of 
pottage composed of mulligatawney soup, sauer- 
kraut or other delicatessen. Germany, as will be 
seen, had excellent reasons for thinking that she 
knew better. Germany had long perceived that 
American society was a vast field for the cuckoo 
colonization by which she hopes to establish 
her economic, industrial, moral, even political, 
dominion throughout the world. But of this, when 
the war broke out, the American people had little 
inkling. They had never even heard of the ingenious 
device, the Delbriick law of July 22, 191 3, by which 
the Germans who live in foreign countries — even ^ 
the descendants of old German immigrants — could 
become naturalized citizens of those countries while 
still preserving their allegiance as German subjects. 
Washington, as has been seen, was better, slightly 
better, informed, but its knowledge had the sole 
[49] 



HESITATIONS 

result of inspiring the passionate appeal of the 
President to the American people, to remain "im- 
partial in thought as well as in action," so as to hold 
themselves " ready to . . . speak the counsels 
of peace and accommodation." 

The attitude of the President was the signal for a 
grave misunderstanding between two continents. 
That such a misunderstanding could occur was in 
itself merely the proof of a latent reciprocal incom- 
prehension, which only a few observers had detected, 
and of which the sudden revelation now astonished 
both worlds. The United States, then, was not 
what Europe had supposed it to be? But was the 
United States what even the North Americans had 
fancied it was? At all events Europe was more 
mysterious and incomprehensible, and far more 
different from America, than the Americans had 
supposed. Europe and the United States were 
two reciprocally repellent poles, and the chief in- 
terest of the action of the President was its startling 
suggestion of this truth. 

[50] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

The conduct of the Americans of the past had 
given the French and EngHsh of the present every 
reason for being mystified by what appeared to be 
the singular apathy of the American people and of 
their Government. The facts were patent. The 
American people, as a whole, were blandly uncon- 
scious of the fact that the Great War might ever be 
for them a possible occasion of active participation. 
Europe was for them another world, an Old World 
from which they had joyously cast adrift, a region 
where whatever happened was a legitimate and 
often curious object of study but quite without in- 
tegral relation to their own concerns and interests. 
The War of Independence, the American Revolu- 
tion, had been fought in order to procure to human 
beings on the American Continent the privilege of 
working out their individual and national salvation 
in their own way. None of the spasmodic but 
widely separated collisions of the peoples of the 
Western Hemisphere with the worlds of England 
and of Continental Europe had been of a sort to 
[51] 



HESITATIONS 

shatter the American pride in this rare privilege of 
a geographical isolation that warranted their en- 
joyment of an illusion as to the special character 
of their civilization. This illusion survived even 
the shock of the war with Spain, for that war seemed 
to be mainly a war waged for the introduction into 
the neighboring American islands of Cuba of con- 
ceptions of life, of liberty, and of happiness that 
the American Declaration of Independence had 
formulated. That this particular war had involved 
the United States, at the Philippines, in Far Eastern 
complications, was on the whole a matter for regret, 
not for imperialistic jubilation. At all events, 
possession of the Philippines was an accident and 
could never be contemplated save in the light of 
the traditional American idea that Americans were 
the wardens of humanity. The average American 
regarded European events as interesting, but quite 
without vital importance for the United States. 
And all that he knew of the one principle of inter- 
national action or inaction to which his Govern- 
[52] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

ment had officially subscribed, the Monroe Doctrine, 
fully confirmed his natural ignorance and indiffer- 
ence with regard to the affairs of the effete worlds 
beyond the Atlantic. 

There was, thus, a pathetico-comic and pro- 
digious misunderstanding between the inhabit- 
ants of two halves of the planet. Never in the 
history of any State was a competent leader , 
more urgently needed than in the United States of 
1914. 

But Washington was not the American people. 
Washington had traditions and was supposed to 
possess knowledge. However, impressed and pre- 
occupied by the fears as to the reaction which the 
war might have on the variegated social world of the 
United States, yet an instant's reflection should have 
suggested to the President that the very reasons he 
had given for suppression of thought and action 
were just the reasons that foresighted statesmanship 
would have adduced in justification of precautionary 
action of quite another kind, namely, the employ- 
[53] 



HESITATIONS 

ment of those instruments which were being left to 
rust. It was just because the United States had 
become a community as to the moral and political 
character of which one could not be sure, that no 
time should be given any one for enlarging the cracks 
in the edifice of the national unity; and, for a states- 
man there was more than one way of utilizing the 
fact so conspicuously brought to light by the war — 
the fact that the United States was not a nation — 
for the construction of a larger unity, moral and 
political, than the United States had ever dreamed 
of. The war was revealing to the average man 
that the United States was not a nation, and 
Mr. Wilson had shown that this was the great fact 
that preoccupied him as a political leader. But 
since the United States was not a nation, the aim 
of the President should have been to help to make 
it a nation. He had lost the best of opportunities 
of effecting this end. Matters must now take 
their course. Happily the President had cast 
one solid anchor to windward, his diplomatic round- 

[54] 



AMERICAN "NEUTRALITY 

robin* of October 24, 19 14, stating that he meant to 
defend international law on the high seas. If the war 
really continued, he would at all events be able to 
stick to that. 

There can be no doubt that the President had 
accurately determined what was bound to be the 
first state of mind of the average man throughout 
the length and breadth of the United States on 
learning of the improbable events in Europe. What 
did the average American man know of the causes 
of the horrible explosion? How could he believe 
any of the incredible accusations of which the Ger- 
mans were the object? The motives attributed to 
them, the reports of their unheard-of methods of 
making war, were the inevitable, natural inventions 
of their enemies. Such crimes were not committed 
by the sort of people the Germans were well known 

*" Round Robin" by anticipation. The document in question 
bore the sole signature of the Acting Secretary of State, Mr. 
Lansing, but the President at the time was deeply meditating 
his Pan-American policy, and cherished the hope that it would 
eventually turn out that he had spoken, too, for Latin-America. 
See Chapter V. 

[55] 



HESITATIONS 

to be. But that the American people were ill or 
well informed, well or badly led, was apparently no 
concern of Washington. All that Washington de- 
sired to know was what the American people thought, 
what the American people wanted. Over and over 
again in his public utterances during the war the 
President declared it to be his one preoccupation 
executively to carry out the wishes of the American 
people. 

Technically, this attitude might be described as 
"plebiscitary diplomacy," application of the ref- 
erendum to international business. It was an at- 
tempt to follow the line of least resistance, in obedi- 
ence to a happy divination of the average temper 
and prejudices of the American democracy. That 
was excellently Jeffersonian. It was government 
oj the people hy the people. But it remained to 
be seen whether it was worthy of the name of govern- 
ment jor the people. What was obvious was that 
it was not the President who was "keeping the 
American people out of war "; it was they themselves ' 
[56] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

who were opposing whatsoever might lead to war. 
And as a matter of fact, far from furthering the 
desire of the American people not to become mixed 
up in the war, the Presidential hesitations at the 
outset, his failure to protest against Germany's 
breach of public law in Belgium, were bound to 
entail many risks of unnecessary complications that 
might logically lead to war, and that might not be 
confined to the civil internecine disturbances which 
the President so much dreaded — but which, too, his 
action had contributed to arouse. 

The President's appeal to the American people 
on August 14th showed many things, but it showed 
above all that the Head of the State was keenly 
alive to the fact that immigration was a problem 
which, owing to the Great War, was about to as- 
sume an importance political and national, and not 
merely economic. Before the war it was suffi- 
ciently obvious to any observer of inductive mind, and 
prone to cross stanchioning his general conclusions, 
that — apart from the fact of the annual passage 
[57] 



HESITATIONS 

through the Imperial-American turnstiles at Ellis 
Island of a million more or less of immigrants — such 
questions as the attitude of California or of Arizona 
in recklessly thwarting the trading rights of aliens, 
admitted to the privilege of citizenship under the 
general Federal laws of the land, were significant 
chiefly because they raised the supremely interesting 
problem of Inter-State Constitutional Relations in a 
community which even the Civil War between North 
and South had not completely unified. These 
questions led instantly to the much more important 
one as to how completely, after all, the United States 
had become a nation. That question, which the 
average preoccupied citizen of the United States 
rarely put to himself — owing to the fact that the 
relatively few international contacts of his country 
permitted him to apply to the Californian and 
Arizona scandals the widespread American saw: 
"I should worry" — suddenly began to din itself 
into the ears of every real American when the Great 
European War of 19 14 broke out; and it is to the 
[58] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

credit of the President of the United States that he 
realized the fact and issued a warning to the Ameri- 
can people before the war was ten days old. 

The immediate echoes in the United States of the 
startling events in Europe were repeated with a 
dissonance that showed of what disquieting hetero- 
geneous elements the nation was composed. The 
vast spaces bounded by the Canadian frontier, the 
Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific, 
this unique Imperial refuge for the oppressed or the 
adventuresome of older worlds, was seen to be in- 
habited by an agglomeration of races and peoples 
less reciprocally assimilated than any citizen of the 
United States would have cared to admit. The 
famous melting-pot of nations was seen, after all, 
to be full of unamalgamated scoriae. The spectacle 
even suggested doubt as to whether these scoriae 
were amalgamable. The situation was one of such 
gravity as to make it seem prudent for the Head of 
the State to justify recommendations of national 
neutrality by arguments which were a confession 
[59] 



HESITATIONS 

of the small degree of nationality as yet attained by 
the nondescript population of the Republic. This 
all but tyrannical veto, on the part of the head of his 
country, not only of all debate, but positively of all 
thinking, on matters connected with the origins/ 
and responsibilities of the war was an action un- 
paralleled in the history of the world. The occasion 
was one when it would have been natural for the 
noblest, most traditional idealism to take sides with 
the Champions of Right against Arbitrary Power. 

That the Presidential cry was warranted by the 
peculiar gravity and the grave peculiarity of the 
circumstances many a sociologist will no doubt 
readily acknowledge. For it should be noted that 
neither Rome, nor Madrid, nor Stockholm, nor 
Copenhagen, nor yet any other capital of any reason- 
ably homogeneous national community — not even 
Monaco — witnessed the signature of any such pe- 
culiar declaration of neutrality as Washington be- 
held. And if this be so it is because neither Italy 
nor Spain neither Sweden nor Denmark found so 
[60] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

Strangely special a kind of self-protecting, self- 
sacrificing ordinance imperative. That is to say, 
the Great War brought home to the United States 
the unique character of its attempt to make a nation 
in ways in which nations have never yet been formed ; 
and the terms of the President's appeal for neu- 
trality of so peculiar a sort declared not less start- 
lingly to the world that the United States had not 
yet worked out its national salvation, that it was 
not yet a nation. 

It is indeed worth while insisting, in this con- 
nection, on the point that, once having been a 
nation, the United States was now merely "The 
Land Where Hatred Expires."* 

The gradually accelerated movement in the 



*The title of a very eloquent and invaluable document illus- 
trating the most idea! aspirations of the American spirit, a 
lecture by the Professor of the History of French Culture at the 
Rice Institute, Houston, Texas, in which the author, a French- 
man, only ten years resident in the United States, Mr. Albert 
Leon Guerard gives his touching and admirable reasons why 
"the newcomers, the immigrants, are at heart the true Ameri- 
cans." — Publications of the American Association for International 
Conciliation, No. 98. 

[61] 



/ HESITATIONS 

centralization of government, which began with the 
Civil War, and which the legal mind is no doubt 
bound to deplore as reckless and dangerous Federal 
usurpation,* is a sign of the maturing birth travail 
of the North American Republic as a homogeneous 
nation. For instance, it became convenient for 
the population of this vast community to have gov- 
ernment legal tender notes, to possess a national 
banking system, and, finally, to adopt a protective 
tariff; then to interfere with the internal affairs of 
this or that State by the power to regulate com- 
merce. The United States Supreme Court, the 
venerated interpreter of the Constitution, unfail- 
ingly registered the approval by the vast majority 
of the people of these devices for improving, even 
at the cost of a certain doctrinaire "liberty," and 
of certain "State rights," the mechanism of social 
relations in a community bent on securing busi- 
ness efficiency even in national affairs. That this 



* See a characteristic case, Mr. Franklin Pierce's "Federal 
Usurpation." — Appleton, 1908. 

[62] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

tendency might be making toward State socialism 
seemed in no wise to disquiet the masses of the 
people nor their leaders, although when the project 
of a Federal-owned merchant marine was cham- 
pioned by President Wilson, the Senatorial leaders 
of the Opposition reflected the conservative anxieties 
of the more responsible organs of public opinion, 
of the competent specialists in the shipping world, 
and, indeed, of the business world in general, in 
protesting against a measure which, whatever else 
might be said of it, was, at all events, a long step on 
the way to Socialistic centralization. These pro- 
tests were treated in a spirit almost Napoleonic of 
plebiscitary demagogism by the Head of the State, 
who, speaking on January 8, 191 5, at Indianapolis, 
not only remarked: "I have to say to editors of 
great newspapers that I never take my opinion of 
the American people from their editorials," but 
even, with a sneer that betrayed how little the 
United States Executive is concerned with the ideal 
of the preservation of Representative Government 
[63] 



HESITATIONS 

in the Western Hemisphere, described his Senatorial 
opponents as follows: "Some of them are misguided; 
some of them are blind; most of them are ignorant. 
I would rather pray for them than abuse them." 

So prone is collective human nature in democratic 
communities to have its work done for it by a man 
willing, as was Louis Napoleon, to pass himself off, 
or to allow himself to be put forward, as efficient, 
that the reckless demagogic note of these utterances, 
instead of arousing indignation, was received with- 
out dismay. This is the result, familiar to historians, 
of an appeal to the "people," to number, over the 
heads of the representatives of the people. It has 
as its corollary — and the consequence has never 
failed at any moment of history — the utterly un- 
American destruction of the idea of liberty, in- 
dividual right, and, indeed, of all the guarantees 4- 
which British citizens, for instance, had been proud- 
est of in their slow organization of the democracy 
until, by the rapid evolution toward single-chamber 
tyranny, they too, all but secured a method of gov- 
[64] 



AMERICAN neutrality' 

ernment no less subversive of individual right than 
is the bestowing of virtually uncheckable power upon 
the Presidential Executive at Washington. 

The rapid development of executive authority 
in the United States cannot be too strongly insisted >(, 
Upon; but it must be noted that as a phenomenon 
it is the very opposite of those phenomena of so- 
called "federal usurpations" which are organizing 
the democracy for national ends. " Executive 
usurpation" is imperilling many of the most char- 
acteristic interests of the nation, though it un- 
doubtedly offers in certain cases such guarantees of 
efficient action as no representative Parliamentary 
system of government can give. The multiple 
proofs of the rapid grafting of Napoleonic plebisci- 
tary demagogic ideas upon the Constitution of the 
United States mark a tendency toward one-man 
domination the like of which exists nowhere else in . 
the world at the present hour. Whether this be 
an excellent or scandalous state of things is not so 
interesting a question as is the inquiry, what is 
[65] 



HESITATIONS 

likely to come of it. The success of Mr. Roosevelt 
in utilizing the Constitution for the aggrandizement 
of the Executive authority — the encroachment of 
that authority upon the other functions of the 
Government — has been far outstripped by Mr. 
Wilson's achievements in the same direction. The 
parallel stops there, however. Mr. Roosevelt util- 
ized the Executive authority mainly to enhance the 
national prestige in international relations. Mr. 
Wilson was chiefly concerned in administering, by 
the instrument of a perfectly disciplined political 
party, the internal affairs of the United States. 
He sought to respond to what he believed to be 
the prejudices and the points of view of the masses 
of the people, and his own interpretation of their 
feelings was what he conscientiously sought to 
convert into statute law. His two remarkable 
measures of constructive statesmanship, reform 
of the tariff, and the Federal Bank law, whatever 
their merits or defects, had little significance as 

regards the International policy of the United 
[66] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

States, a matter to which he attended only under 
pressure. 

The Great War that so suddenly burst out in 
Europe had, then, this advantage, at all events, for 
the United States: it forced upon President and 
people the obligation to consider questions of 
national prestige. It compelled American citizens 
to reflect on the problem of their relation with 
citizens of other countries and on the nature of 
international business. 

The German Foreign Office, and paid German 
agents on American soil, were happily to facilitate 
American meditations on these matters in a way 
that even the most sanguine American patriot 
could hardly hope for, and that even the best- 
informed student of Pan-German methods could 
hardly anticipate. The history of German efforts, 
subtle and gross, to deform American opinion, the 
insolence of the German machinations to intimidate "+^ 
American public men, American bankers, the 
American Government, might well form the theme 
[67] 



HESITATIONS 

of an entire book.* For the purposes of the present 
discussion their detailed chronicling is unimportant. 
What is important is to note that the whole strange 
record became cumulatively an object-lesson for 
the instruction of the American public, and that, 
at the same time, the American public awoke, with 
its President, not only to the fact that the Germans 
were the Germans, that the classical method of 
German diplomatic action is bluff, that Pan- 
Germanism is an asphyxiating gas for all the ideals 
of the civilized peoples — truths already long known 
in Europe — but also to the facts, far more important 
to the American people, that the United States 
might perhaps be a peculiar nation, but that at all 
events it must be a real nation or succumb, and 
that military preparedness is unfortunately one ofyl^ 
the inevitable necessary means to that end. The 
very President who, in 19 14 and 1915, was still 



* It already has formed the theme of an entire book, and the 
book is an excellent one: "German Conspiracies in America," 
by William H. Skaggs, with an Introduction by Theodore Andrea 
Cook. — T. Fisher Unwin, 19 16. 

[68] 



AMERICAN "NEUTRALITY 

talking of mediation and of the peaceful idealism of 
the United States, was, in the winter of 1916, 
during a whirlwind tour of the Middle West, to 
make frantic appeals to the bad faith of the so-called 
"hyphenated" population of German-Americans, 
and to the guileless apathy of the average American 
man, to realize that the United States was not, 
after all, a community that had developed on some 
distant Atlantis isolated from all international 
contacts, and that the country might, in spite of all 
its efforts, be dragged into war. The man who, on 
the fourth day after the sinking of the Lusitania, 
had declared in a public speech in Philadelphia that 
"a man may be too proud to fight" was to make in 
Chicago, one of the largest German cities in the 
world, on the last day of January, 19 16, a confession 
of singular significance: 

It is not a happy circumstance to have these tense 
moments of national necessity arise, and yet 1 for 
my part am not sorry that this necessity has arisen. 
It has awakened me myself, 1 frankly confess to you, 

[69I 



HESITATIONS 

to many things and many conditions which a year 
ago I did not realize. It may be that large bodies of 
our fellow-citizens were resting in a false security 
based on an imaginary correspondence of all the 
world with the conceptions under which they were 
themselves conducting their own lives. It is prob- 
ably a fortunate circumstance, therefore, that Amer- 
ica has been cried awake by these voices of the dis- 
turbed and reddened night, when fire sweeps sullenly 
from continent to continent, and it may be that in 
this red flame of light there will rise again that ideal 
figure of America holding up her hand of hope and 
of guidance to the people of the world. 

It had depended solely upon the President of the 
Republic, as has been seen, to help that "ideal 
figure of America" of which Mr. Wilson spoke in 
Chicago, to "hold up her hand of hope and of 
guidance" side by side with the ideal figures of 
Serbia, of Belgium, and of Belgium's allies at the 
outset of the war. But, as the President confessed 
so frankly, he was then sleeping, he was not then 
"awake to many things and many conditions" 
which a year of dire experience had revealed to him 
[70] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

as well as to the people of America. "A year ago," 
he said apologetically, "it did seem as if America 
might rest secure without any great anxiety, and 
take it for granted that she would not be drawn 
into the maelstrom," but now things had got to 
such a pass that American citizens might any day 
be "called upon to stand behind the President in 
order to maintain the honor of the United States." 
In April, 191 5, in the mid-period of the era of the 
Presidential illusions, long before the amende honor- 
able of Chicago, Mr. Wilson was still cherishing the 
following ingenious ideas: 

We are the mediating nation of the world. I do 
not mean that we undertake not to mind our own 
business and to mediate where other people are 
quarrelling. I mean the word in a broader sense. 
We are compounded of the nations of the world. 
We mediate their blood, we mediate their traditions, 
we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, their pas- 
sions; we are ourselves compounded of those things. 

We are therefore able to understand all nations; 
we are able to understand them in the compound, 
not separately, as partisans, but unitedly, as know- 

[71] 



HESITATIONS 

ing and comprehending and embodying them all. 
It is in that sense that I mean that America is a 
mediating nation. The opinion of America, the 
action of America, is ready to turn and free to turn 
in any direction. 

Did you ever reflect upon how almost all other 
nations, almost every other nation, has through 
long centuries been headed in one direction? ThatV, 
is not true of the United States. The United States 
has no racial momentum. It has no history back 
of it which makes it run all its energies and all its 
ambitions in one particular direction, and America 
is particularly free in this, that she has no hamper- 
ing ambitions as a World Power. 

If we have been obliged by circumstances, or 
have considered ourselves obliged by circumstances, 
in the past to take territory which we otherwise 
would not have thought of taking, I believe I am 
right in saying that we would have considered it our 
duty to administer that territory not for ourselves, 
but for the people living in it, and to put this burden 
upon our consciences, not to think that this thing is 
ours for our use, but to regard ourselves as trustees 
of the great business for those to whom it does really 
belong, trustees ready to hand over the cosmic trust 
at any time, when the business seems to make that 
possible and feasible. 

[72] 



AMERICAN "neutrality 

That the United States enjoys the privilege of a 
"cosmic trust," as the President so superbly claimed, 
was perhaps an excessive pretension — the average 
American might characteristically have dubbed 
it a "long order" — but in Europe, at all events, one 
people only, the Germans, had any thought of gain- 
saying it; and it was just because the American 
people had been so long in coming round to a right 
notion of its admitted birthright that there had been 
such surprise throughout the world and such tem- 
porary loss of American prestige. A little more than 
six months were to pass in the still prolonged din of 
war, with sinking merchantmen, with astounding 
conspiracies on American soil, and the President, 
now almost completely "awake to the many things 
and the many conditions" to which he alluded in 
Chicago, was to insert in his Annual Message a really 
startling passage: 

I have in mind no thought of any immediate or 
particular danger arising out of our relations with 
other nations. We are at peace with all nations in 

[73] 



Y- 



HESITATIONS 

the world, and there is reason to hope that no ques- 
tion in controversy between this and other govern- 
ments will lead to any serious breach in amicable 
relations. Grave as some differences of attitude 
and policy have been and may yet turn out to be, 
I am sorry to say that the gravest threats against 
our national peace and safety have been uttered 
within our own borders. There are citizens of the 
United States, I blush to admit, born under other 
flags, but welcomed under our generous naturali- 
zation laws to full freedom of opportunity in Amer- 
ica, who have poured poison and disloyalty into the 
very arteries of our national life, and who have 
sought to bring the authority and good name of 
our Government into contempt, to destroy our in- 
dustries, wherever they thought it effective for their 
vindictive purpose to strike at them, and to debase 
our policies to the uses of foreign intrigue. Their 
number is not great as compared with the whole 
number of those sturdy hosts by which our nation 
has been enriched in recent generations out of virile 
foreign stocks, but it is great enough to have brought 
deep disgrace upon us and to have made it necessary 
that we should promptly make use of the processes 
of law whereby they may be purged of their corrupt 
distempers. 
America has never witnessed anything like this 

[74] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

before, and never dreamed it possible that men 
sworn into her citizenship, men drawn out of the 
great free stocks, such as have suppHed some of 
the best and strongest elements of that little but now 
heroic nation that in the high day of old staked its 
very life to free itself from every entanglement that 
had darkened the fortunes of older nations, and set 
up a new standard here, that men of such origins 
and such free choice of allegiance would ever turn 
in malign reaction against the Government and 
the people who had welcomed and nurtured them, 
and seek to make this proud country once more a 
hotbed of European passion. A little while ago 
such a thing would have seemed incredible. We 
made no preparation for such a contingency. We 
would have been almost ashamed to prepare for 
it, as if we were suspicious of ourselves and of our 
own comrades and neighbors. 

But the ugly and incredible thing actually has 
come about, and we are without adequate Federal 
laws to deal with it. I urge you to enact such laws 
at the earliest possible moment, and 1 feel that in 
doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than to 
save the honor and self-respect of the nation. Such 
creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must 
be crushed out. They are not many, but they are 
infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power 

[75] 



HESITATIONS 

should close over them at once. They have formed 
plots to destroy property, they have entered into 
conspiracies against the neutrality of the Govern- 
ment, and they have sought to pry into every con- 
fidential transaction of the Government in order to 
serve interests alien to our own. 

The passage is, indeed, remarkable. It reflects 
the average American sense of bewilderment on 
awakening from the fool's paradise in which almost 
all Americans had lived for a generation and from 
which they were being hunted by the bursting 
shells of the Great War. " We made no preparation 
for such a contingency. We would have been al- 
most ashamed to prepare for it, as if we were sus- 
picious of ourselves and our own comrades and ^ 
neighbors." This was the exact truth, the naive 
and the naked truth. But it was only part of the 
truth. 

Ordinary knowledge of European affairs made it 
plain that the war was begun not by accident but 
with purpose which would! not soon be relinquished. 
Ordinary knowledge of military events made it 

[76I 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

plain from the moment when the tide of German 
invasion turned from the battle of the Marne that 
the conflict was certain to be long and desperate. 
Ordinary knowledge of history — of our own history 
during the Napoleonic Wars — made it plain that 
in that conflict neutral rights would be worthless 
unless powerfully maintained. All the world had 
fair notice that, as against the desperate belligerent 
resolve to conquer, the law of nations and the law 
of humanity interposed no effective barriers for the 
protection of neutral rights. Ordinary practical 
sense in the conduct of affairs demanded that such 
steps should be taken that behind the peaceable 
assertion of our country's rights, its independence 
and its honor, should stand power, manifest and 
available, warning the whole world that it would 
cost too much to press aggression too far. The 
Democratic Government at Washington did not 
see it. Others saw it and their opinions found 
voice.* 

This "ordinary knowledge" was lacking in Wash- 
ington; yet German methods ought to have been 
well known there. It was, no doubt, too much to 



* Speech of Elihu Root at the New York Republican Conven- 
tion, February 15, 1916. 

I77] 



HESITATIONS 

expect* that the warnings of the small minority of 
competent observers would result in any more 

* The present writer expected nothing of the kind. His " Prob- 
lems of Power," the first edition of which appeared in the spring- 
time of 1913, contained dozens of passages like the following: 

"Fortunately — or unfortunately, as it may be regarded — the 
United States has no choice. By the mere fact of deciding to 
construct a Canal at Panama it crossed the Rubicon, took the 
step from which there is no going back, and definitively sealed 
the destiny opened for it in 1898, when it drove Spain out of Cuba. 
At any moment during the years succeeding the Spanish-American 
War, even after its grave decision virtually to annex the Phil- 
ippines, at any moment previous to the glorious and fatal reso- 
lution to build the Panama Canal, it might have undone the 
consequences of its past, thwarted its destiny, and remained 
isolated from the European and Asiatic worlds, a self-sufficient 
mistress of half the North-American Continent, and Protector 
and Over-Lord of Latin America. The Panama Canal has 
changed all that. The United States is now out in the open. 
It is shortly to be swept into the centre of the world's currents 
and counter-currents, and it must learn to trim its sails to the 
winds against which the other Powers are tacking, and to look 
out for the pirate fleets of its rivals. ... A strong American 
Navy has become a vital necessity for the security of the United 
States. America has courted a great responsibility, and she must 
rise to it, or pay the consequences by dismemberment." 

"... Nothing is more obvious than that now at last 
the United States, having issued from its isolation, having be- 
come sooner than it expected, perhaps sooner than it wished, a 
responsible, and no mere dilettante member of the concert of 
nations, will be called on by those nations, driven, that is, by the 
Forceof Things, to conform its favourite principle of the Monroe 
Doctrine to the Law of Nations. No spasmodic, provisional, 
merely empirically opportunist readjustment of that Doctrine 

[78] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

efficient action in the United States than did, in 
England, the Delenda est Carthago of Lord Roberts 

to this or that new need or situation, as they may arise, will any 
longer be tolerated. The attempt to defer the complete solution 
of this grave problem by arousing waves of enthusiasm in favour 
of Hague Conferences, unrestricted Arbitration Treaties, or any 
other desirable and elevated form of the humanitarian and Chris- 
tian ideal of Pacifism, will be regarded as hypocritical, and may 
even suggest the cuttle-fish policy of spurting forth an inky 
channel to cover its escape from its pursuers. Meanwhile the 
most elementary attempt to preserve the essence of its great 
national " Doctrine," while introducing it into the recognized 
corpus of International Law, will prove to the United States the 
wisdom of becoming as speedily as possible a strong naval and 
military Power. The same self-interest will suggest the parallel 
prudence of not doing anything to alienate the vast Imperial 
Community of men of its own flesh and blood, who, previously 
separated from it by an estranging sea, have now become its 
close neighbours, and even a possible menace to its insufficiently 
protected borders. If, from failure to divine the inevitable drift 
of the time, to distinguish clearly the character of the forces to 
which it must conform, the United States, repudiating its ideal- 
istic past, were to sufl'er serious friction to be set up along the 
new frontiers now uniting it to, instead of dividing it from, the 
British Empire; if it were to let the problems created by the 
Panama Canal engender between it and England, Canada and 
Australia, such ill-feeling as would prepare the diplomatic ground 
at Washington for the signing of an Entente between Berlin and 
Washington for their common defence against British and Russo- 
Japanese competition, both military and commercial — should it 
drift into such a situation, it would have to bear the responsibility 
of an act which would upset the entire balance of power in Europe, 
and result in a war involving the interests of the entire population 
of our planet." 

[79] 



HESITATIONS 

or of Leo Maxse. But Washington was expected 
to keep vigilant guard over the interests of the 
American people. Had all the precedents and 
traditions accumulated in the bureaus of the Secre- 
tary of State been suddenly obliterated by the great 
political upheaval that had substituted, a few years 
before, the Democratic party for the party that had 
so long held office? Was there no one there who 
recalled that, though Frederick II, as Bismarck 
was never tired of reminding the North Americans, 
was the first ruler to recognize the independence of 
England's American colonies, the same Bismarck 
secretly sought to "antagonize American policy," 
publishing in the Hamburger Nachrichten a vio- 
lent article against the Monroe Doctrine, which 
he called "an incredible impertinence to the rest 
of the world"? This was in 1896, before similar 
pretensions to hegemony on the European Con- 
tinent became the ideal of Prussian policy. Ger- 
many and the United States had already quarrelled 
in 1888 over the Samoan Islands, and ten years later, 
[80I 



AMERICAN "NEUTRALITY 

at the moment of the Spanish-American War, Wash- i 
ington discovered that but for England's support '^ 
and the sympathy of France — in the spirit of the 
Canning attitude of 1823 — Europe under Germany's 
lead might have succeeded in creating a fresh Holy 
Alliance Coalition against the United States. Every 
one recalls the incident between Admirals Dewey 
and Diedrichs in the Philippines. Again, in 1901, 
the joint intervention of England, Germany, and 
Italy in Venezuela, ostensibly in defense of purely 
economic interests, was seen, as Mr. Coolidge 
puts it, to be an effort of Germany to test the Monroe 
Doctrine. For greater security she had persuaded 
the other two Powers to join her. It was the familiar 
German way, the way I have had occasion so often to 
indicate in my analysis of her dealings with the 
Powers, her habit of getting other nations to pull 
the chestnuts out of the fire.* 

Had the State Department at Washington com- 



*Cf. "Germany's 'Policy towards the United States," by Fab- 
ricius. fortnightly Review, January, 1915. 

[81] 



HESITATIONS 

pletely forgotten these evidences of Germany's 
persistent effort to drive a wedge of reciprocal dis- 
trust and hatred between England and the United 
States? Had Washington ever read — or if Wash- 
ington had read it, did it read it with the detach- 
ment that it would have read "The Last of the 
Mohicans" or "Gil Bias" — the little book published 
at Leipzig in 1907 by one Emil Witte, entitled 
"Experiences at a German Embassy: Ten Years 
of German-American Diplomacy"? Herr Witte, 
who in 1898 was an editor of the Deustche Zeitung 
in Vienna, paid out of the secret-service funds, 
under the admirable Bismarckian reptile press 
system, began his duties at Washington in January, 
1899, his instructions being to silence the anti- 
German press and to arouse hatred of England. If 
Washington had perused his book it would have 
discovered not merely useful information as to the 
excellent espionage activities of certain German 
professors, but it would have fallen upon such sug- 
gestive remarks as this: "Americans swallow any 
[82] 



AMERICAN "neutrality" 

bait greedily so long as it is . . . placed before 
them with a friendly smile." It would have learned 
that Germany sent Prince Henry of Hohenzollern V 
to the United States to spy out the land, and that 
in his report to his Imperial brother Prince Henry 
confirmed the views of Herr von Holleben, the 
German Ambassador, to the effect that one-third of 
the population of the United States was of German 
descent or birth, and that a war between Germany 
and the United States would assume the character 
of a civil war. If Washington had read the curious 
revelations in this book — curious revelations, yet 
commonplace enpugh to all serious students of 
international affairs — it would have seen why Ger- 
many, after having for so long despised as renegades, 
ihe exiled Germans in America, suddenly invented 
a diabolically ingenious legislative device permitting 
them to become naturalized American citizens while 
remaining German subjects and German soldiers, 
mobilizable for every form of Pan-German action 
on North American, as well as South American, or 
[83] 



HESITATIONS 

British, French, Russian, or other hospitable soil. 
And Washington would have learned as well, long 
before the sinister object-lessons of 1916, that 
German action not merely synchronized, but was 
coordinable, with the Fenian activities of certain 
Irish organizations that were conspiring on Ameri- 
can soil against the unity of the British Empire. 

Had no one in Washington paid attention, for in- 
stance, to the characteristic remarks of Michael 
Davitt, on the 14th of May, 1898, just after Mr. 
Chamberlain had delivered his famous speech sug- 
gesting an Anglo-Saxon Alliance? With jubilant 
irony the terrible Irish leader reminded the readers 
of the Times that the advocates of an Anglo-Saxon 
Alliance "ignored the patent fact that the United 
States at the present moment are less 'Anglo- 
Saxon' in their population than even Ireland." 
He adduced figures. He took the population of the 
United States as 70,000,000, and he divided them as 
follows: Irish, 16,000,000; Teutonic race (including 
Germans, Dutch, and Austrians), 14,000,000; British 
[84] 



AMERICAN "neutrality 

English, Scotch, and Welsh), 13,000,000; Huns, 
Slavs, and Jews (PoHsh, Hungarian, Russian, etc.), 
7,000,000; colored races, 7,000,000; French (in- 
cluding emigrants from Lower Canada), 5,000,000; 
Scandinavians, 3,000,000; Italians, 2,000,000; Portu- 
guese, Spanish, and other Continental races (in- 
cluding Jews), 3,000,000. "What were known," 
added Mr. Michael Davitt, "as the 'New England' 
States a generation ago are now peopled by a ma- 
jority of the Irish race"; and it was not necessary to 
belong to what Oliver Wendell Holmes called the 
"blueblood*' of Boston's Beacon Hill to be deeply 
impressed, even in 1898, by this verity. What were 
Mr, Michael Davitt's conclusions? They may be 
summed up in the single one that an Anglo-Saxon 
Alliance was a dream. "All talk about the 'Mother- 
land' being in trouble, and about 'blood being 
thicker than water' is interesting," he said, "if we 
ignore the figures and facts, which knock these 
sentimental fictions into racial smithereens." And 
he added, with a lively prophetic plausibility: "Any 
[85] 



HESITATIONS 

Administration in America which would venture 
upon any such alliance as that so eloquently and 
pathetically pleaded for by Mr. Chamberlain last 
night would not get a sanction for it from a United 
States Senate. Such a sanction would destroy any 
party, Republican or Democratic, to which a major- 
ity of assenting Senators might belong. Every 
Irish, every German, every French voter in the 
States would 'go for' the party that could thus give 
to England such an enormous advantage over her 
rivals without any compensating reward for Amer- 
ica." 

The time was to come when the excessive develop- 
ment of the state of things so curiously analyzed 
by the Irish leader was to bring with it logically 
the suggestion of a "compensating reward," possibly 
inherent in the adoption of the very solution — an 
Anglo-Saxon Alliance — which in 1898 seemed ab- 
surd. German pacific penetration, Irish "Sinn 
Feinism," were to bring forth their astringent fruit. 
It was rare good fortune for the American people, 
[86] 



AMERICAN "neutrality" 

since nothing else (not even South American prox- 
imity, nor the problems of the Caribbean, nor the 
opening of the Panama Canal, nor the spectacle of 
overflowing immigration, nor the collisions with 
Japan) could open their eyes to the rapid advance 
of the fated hours when they must alter their con- 
ception of all the American values — it was rare good 
fortune for the American people that an event like 
the great World War should suddenly force them to 
reflect on the problems of their place in the world, 
on the "promise of American life," on their destiny 
as a nation, and, indeed, on the question whether 
they were really a nation at all. But it will be 
recorded as a remarkable fact of American history 
that at the moment when the American people was 
most in need of guidance it was obliged to work out 
its own salvation without adequate leadership. 

How grave the moment was, and is, the facts 
already cited have amply illustrated. The fol- 
lowing anecdote is a picturesque confirmation of 
William ll's insidious aims as regards the national 
[87J 



HESITATIONS 

integrity of the United States, and the impudent 
machinations of the German Government for the 
destruction of our unity as a nation.* 

In July, 1 90 1, a small party of French ladies and 

gentlemen, including the Due de B , the 

Comtesse de S , Monsieur de Saint-Andre, 

Comte de Martimprey, and Comte Gaston de 
Segur, were entertained at dinner by William II on 
board the imperial yacht Hohen^ollern, then anchored 
in a Norwegian fjord at Odde. During the evening 
the Emperor touched agreeably upon a hundred 
themes. He talked with remarkable frankness, 
and was particularly interesting and outspoken in 
conversation with my friend. Monsieur de Saint- 
Andre, who has placed his notes of the Emperor's 
confidences at my disposal. For fifteen years he 
had refrained from publishing them, although one 
of the Emperor's guests, Monsieur de Segur, had 
published, a short time after the dinner, an article 

* I communicated these utterances of the EmperoT to the 
New York fVorld. They appeared in that journal on May 21, 
1916. 

[88] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

reporting certain of the Emperor's opinions. To- 
day no consideration of social convention, or of 
tact, obliges any one of the Emperor's interlocutors 
to silence and I am authorized by Monsieur de 
Saint-Andre to make whatever use I think best of 
his report of the Emperor's talk. 

Here are the notes verbatim as they were taken 
down immediately after the conversation: 

"The Americans. The vital question for the 
future of Europe and the world. It takes precedence 
of all others, leaving in the shadow divergencies 
that are merely European. Their (the American) 
interference {immixtion) in European affairs is nearer 
at hand, more menacing, than is generally supposed. 
The idea of a European Zollverein will become im- 
perative: it is to be hoped that this will take place 
as soon as possible. This is an opinion which the 
Emperor declares he has had for some consider- 
able time and he says that the only man who had 
looked at the matter in the same way in advance 
was Jules Ferry. . . . The attitude of Eng- 
land towards America. The insistent expressions 
of her sympathy are especially due to fear. She 
wishes to arouse difficulties between the United 

[89] 



HESITATIONS 

States and the other Powers, so as to avoid having 
any of her own. The question of the Samoan Is- 
lands, which the Emperor is very glad finally to 
see settled. How difficult it all was, and that he 
was so mortified at not being able earlier in the day 
to make his voice more loudly heard. But he could 
not do so owing to his lack of a naval force. Prince 
Bismarck has taught him that when you have 
merely a stick as a weapon you must not attack a 
man with a gun. Every question or difficulty of a 
European Power with the United States becomes a 
European question, a European difficulty, a Euro- 
pean interest. The attitude of England therefore 
will have to become clear and frank. She will have 
to take sides. Anglo-American sympathy, is it 
sincere? Desirous of finding out, the Emperor at 
the funeral of 'Grandma' (sic) asked a very consider- 
able personage for his opinion — he is obliged to with- 
hold the name. To the question thus put the reply 
was: 'Those who look behind the scenes do not 
believe in it ! ' The danger is that there is no counter- 
poise to the United States in America. His re- 
grets that France, instead of going to Mexico in 
'66, should not have come materially to the rescue 
of the Confederate troops. While the struggle 
between the Northern States and the Southern 
States is over for ever, it might perhaps be possible 

(90] 



AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 

to look forward to a rivalry, perhaps to a conflict, 
between the East and the West, between the Agri- 
cultural population and the Manufacturing popula- 
tion." 

These utterances need no comment. 



l9i] 



CHAPTER IV 

ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES 

The Submarine Controversy; Collision between the 

President and Congress; A Political Victory 

and a "Diplomatic Victory" 

THE foregoing chapter has put before the 
reader a rapid, and no doubt incomplete, 
but, for the purposes in hand, a perhaps 
adequate, survey of the " many things and the many 
conditions" which were bound to confront the 
American people and American statesmen, above 
all their President, in case of the outbreak of a 
general war in Europe during the latter half of the 
first decade of the twentieth century. 

The survey, however, is incomplete, for no al- 
lusion has been made in it to what may be called 
the psychologic tricks of Prussian diplomacy, the 

[92J 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

methods of the German Government in its dealings 
with other States, as they had been revealed even 
to the average man in Europe at the moment of the 
famous "Coup d'Agadir." Yet these "psychologic 
tricks," these "methods" were an essential part of 
the problem of the world-situation which no student 
of international politics had any right to ignore. 
Nearly the whole of Europe (certain British politi- 
cians excepted) had gradually come to understand, 
for instance, what were the most effective retorts 
for German intimidation and bluff. And as the 
whole of Europe that was not Prussianized had had 
to open its eyes to a truth it had hoped against hope 
it need not accept — the truth that Germany was 
preparing a ruthless, world-wide, aggressive war 
against three absolutely pacific peoples, the French,.''^ 
the Russians, and the British — Europe had gone, in 
perspicacity and knowledge of international things, 
leagues beyond the inhabitants of the Western 
Hemisphere. This Western World was obviously 
quite unready to cope with situations such as Ger- 
[93l 



HESITATIONS 

many was planning to spring upon it. It was, 
therefore, all the more necessary that its responsible 
leaders should be capable, both in character and 
intelligence, of comprehending in advance the 
"many things and many conditions" which the 
President of the United States, as he admitted, 
did not come "to realize" until eighteen months 
after the ultimatum to Serbia, the burning of Lou- 
vain, and the invasion of France — and even then, 
alas, only temporarily. 

But however accurate and extended the knowledge 
which the American people were warranted in de- 
manding of their Government at the outset of the 
war, they could not expect Washington to be able 
to foresee the trend of events on the high seas. 
Washington, however, had a right to believe — it was 
bound, at least, to make a show of believing — that, 
inasmuch as Germany had replied so speedily and 
so favorably to its Note of August 6, 191 4, with 
regard to respecting the Declaration of London as 
to Naval Warfare, that Power would make no breach 
I 94] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

of international law tending to involve the United 
States in the war. In any case, Washington had 
taken in good time the proper precautions for de- 
fending American interests as a "neutral." When, 
therefore, on February 4, 191 5, Germany despatched 
a famous memorandum to the Neutral Powers de- 
claring as a "war zone" all the waters surrounding 
Great Britain and Ireland, the English Channel 
included, and warning the Neutral Powers against 
the risks that their shipping would run in those 
waters, American public opinion held its breath on 
learning of this German pretention to initiate an 
unprecedented form of Naval Warfare, and awaited 
with anxious curiosity the reply of its Department 
of State. Admiral Tirpitz thus inaugurated that 
form of self-defence which Herr Maximilian Harden, 
canniest of the German journalists, was to describe 
in the Zukunft in April, 1916, when the German 
game was seen even by the Germans to be "up," 
as a "surreptitious war against the defenceless." 
As yet no American merchantman had sunk, a 
[95] 



HESITATIONS 

victim of the mysterious new underwater fleet of 
Germany. But it were more convenient that none 
should be sunk. Here, at last, was a fine opportunity 
for the United States to try to recover the position 
as a Champion of Right and Public Law which she 
had gravely compromised by her neglect to protest 
against the wanton assault on Serbia and the viola- 
tion of the neutrality of Belgium. The Allies 
claimed to be effectively blockading German ports. 
Germany retorted, by her invention of a " war zone," 
that she in turn had declared an effective blockade 
of the British Islands, and that she had done this 
by means of the submarine. The submarine, how- 
ever, is an instrument of warfare which is incapable 
of "blockading," in any such sense as has hitherto 
been ascribed by international law to the word 
"blockade." The situation thus presented was, 
even technically speaking, a delicate one, and it 
brought the reality of the war well home, at last, 
to the American people. How would Washington 
deal with this new and interesting situation? 
[96] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

On February loth the United States replied to the 
menace of the German memorandum of February 
4th. The American note was firm and categorical. 
Things were beginning well. This note declared 
the intention of the United States to hold Germany 
to "strict accountability" for all acts of piracy. 
Six days later Germany agreed to the principle set 
forth in the note, but appealed to American com- 
passion, pleaded extenuating circumstances, owing 
to the "peculiar nature" of the struggle for national 
existence (which she had imposed upon the world in 
violating all the laws of international honor)! On 
the seventh of May a transatlantic liner, the un- 
armed Lusiiania, was sent to the bottom of the 
sea unwarned, carrying with her at least one hun- 
dred Americans. Washington called on Germany, 
on May 13th, to make reparations, and declared 
that the United States would "omit no word or 
act " necessary to maintain the rights of its citizens 
on the high seas. An entire year was to pass before 
the President, driven at last to "words" unam- 
[97] 



HESITATIONS 

biguous enough to constitute an "act," menaced 
Germany in such terms that she had to choose be- 
tween humiHation and an immediate rupture of 
relations. 

The note of May 13th despatched, a discussion 
ensued as to whether the Lusitania was or was not 
armed, and on June loth a third American note 
warned Germany, now "with solemn emphasis," 
that the principles of humanity must be maintained. 
The President "hoped against hope" that he need 
not speak again. Just a month later Germany, in 
fact, reiterated her assurances that United States 
ships engaged in legitimate trade would not be at- 
tacked. On July 2 1 St a fourth American note reached 
Berlin. Further attacks on merchantmen carrying 
Americans, it said, would be regarded as "un- 
friendly," and Berlin was requested to understand 
that the United States would contend for freedom 
of the seas, without compromise or cost. Berlin 
made no show of understanding. Many another 
merchantman still was scuttled into Davy Jones's 
[98] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

locker, and Germany stupidly began that parallel 
policy of blackmail which was to be expected. She 
set in motion one of those insolent campaigns of 
diversion and intimidation characteristic of her 
methods throughout the world, the latest and most 
perfect instance of which had been seen in Italy 
during the early months of the war. The prepara- 
tions she had already made on American soil for the 
successful prosecution of such a policy have been 
described in the previous chapter. Meanwhile, 
the Lusitania case remained unsettled. Fires in 
ammunition factories, strikes, outrages of treason- 
able character, were being multiplied throughout 
the United States. German organizations con- 
tinued their machinations against the unity of the 
nation. Potsdam wirepullers were corrupting paci- 
fists and certain politicians. The President's long- 
animity was bearing its logical fruit — ah, if only 
that cursed war might end ! — and Berlin and Vienna, 
more and more convinced that they could act with 
impunity, finally tore off the mask, and formally 
[99] 



HESITATIONS 

notified the United States on February lo, 191 6, 
that after March ist submarines would ruthlessly 
sink armed merchantmen. Just a week later the 
American Secretary of State, Mr. Lansing, informed 
the German Ambassador that the United States 
must have written assurances that the proposed 
submarine warfare would not jeopardize the rights 
of Americans. Meanwhile the German conspirators 
were busy in the Congressional districts and at 
Washington, seeking to force American public 
opinion to demand from the President repudiation 
of his submarine policy. Congress was finally asked 
to pass a bill informing American citizens that if 
they traveled henceforth in the European war-zone 
it would be at their risk and peril! The President 
looked the peril squarely in the face. On March 
7th he forced Congress to take a stand. He sum- 
moned it to declare Yea or 'Nay whether it meant to 
succumb to the dictates of a Foreign Power. The 
American people was, now at last self-consciously, 
mounting the long calvary which stretches ahead of 
[ 100] 



I 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

every people who would become a self-respecting 
nation. 

When the American people realized what was 
going on in Washington, when they beheld the 
President face to face with subversive elements 
which he was manfully seeking to master in the 
interests of the nation, they, too, began to learn the 
lessons which the Head of the State had been so. 
long in learning. The fact was clear: Germany 
was flouting the United States in ways intolerable. 
Her influence was tending to be omnipresent. The 
shock of her impact was so sudden and so powerful 
that the whole central legislative machinery seemed 
momentarily to be thrown out of gear. The pro- 
longed attempt of certain Congressmen and Sena- 
tors to tie the hands of the President in his negotia- 
tions with Germany over the illegal use of sub- 
marines was in reality the revelation of a disposition 
on the part of the Sixty-fourth Congress to sur- 
render American rights at the dictation of a Foreign 
Power. 

[loi] 



HESITATIONS 

The German-Americans subsidized by the Wil- 
helmstrasse had never made a secret of their plans. 
As far back as February, 191 5, the editor of the 
German organ, The Fatherland, which was being 
sent free to innocent homes all over the United 
States, had indited such articles as this: 

" You have called our brothers," Mr. Viereck said, 
" by the vilest names blown to you from the gutters 
of London. You have spat upon the memory of 
our mothers. You have trampled upon the graves 
of our fathers. You have sown the storm: you 
shall reap the whirlwind. You have refused to 
listen to our reasoning. You were deaf to our 
pleas. Now we shall teach you a lesson. We shall 
go into the arena of politics. We shall try to beat 
you at your own game. One hundred and seventy 
members of Congress are of Irish extraction. There 
is no reason why they should not be joined by one 
hundred and seventy of German extraction. There 
is no reason why we should not labor for the election 
of men of our own blood, who are in accord with 
our principles, which are the principles of true Amer- 
icanism. We are with America, right or wrong, at 
all times. But we prefer America right to America 
wrong. We now propose to set America right. We 
[ 102] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

shall not fight singlehanded. Americans of Irish 
and Swedish extraction, Americans of many for- 
bears other than German, even Americans of Yankee 
blood, are with us. You have ridiculed the hyphen. 
We shall make it a virtue. We shall make it a 
bridge between German idealism and American 
idealism. We shall fight for American principles 
as American citizens. If you choose to maintain 
the hyphen to discredit those principles, yours is 
the blame, not ours."* 

At the same time adroit appeals were being made 
to the Irish-Americans in the form of a secret Ger- 
man pamphlet sent out by the German Foreign 
Office and entitled "Great Britain and Europe." 
This work, from the pen of Count Reventlow, 
"printed for private circulation only" among the 
Irish, contained fourteen chapters devoted to Irish 



* A little more than a year later, suiting the action to the word, 
a deputation of German-Americans informed the Republican 
Party leaders that if the Republican Convention at Chicago 
gave the nomination to Mr. Roosevelt, every German-American 
in the country would vote the Democratic ticket. The news- 
papers that recorded this fact mentioned, on the same date 
(June 2, 1916) that Mr. Roosevelt had just "delivered a vigorous 
attack in a speech at St. Louis on the hyphenated Americans, 
whom he accused of moral treason." 

[103I 



HESITATIONS 

history as the Germans would Hke the Irish and the 
world to view it, and culminated in the following 
passages: 

Germany is fighting for her own existence; she is 
fighting also for the liberation of the world. The 
great day of liberation will surely come sooner or 
later. The conditio sine qua non of that liberation 
is the destruction of Britain's maritime supremacy. 
For as long as Britain rules the waves humanity 
must remain her slave. This is fundamental truth. 
And another fundamental truth is that Britain's 
maritime supremacy cannot be destroyed until 
Ireland is a free country. So long as Ireland re- 
mains a British colony — or, rather, a British for- 
tress — Britain can at any time shut off the whole 
of Northern and Eastern Europe from all access 
to the ocean, even as by means of Gibraltar, Port 
Said, and Aden she can close the Mediterranean. 
Ireland is the key of the Atlantic. Release Ireland 
from bondage and the Atlantic is at once opened 
up to Europe. Therefore must Ireland be re- 
stored to Europe if Europe is to be free. An 
independent neutral Irish nation would be the 
natural bulwark of European liberty in the West. 
Freedom depends on freedom of the seas, and 
[ 104] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

freedom of the seas depends on the liberation of 
Ireland.* 



There is nothing peculiar to America in the fact 
that legislative assembhes meddle with foreign 
affairs. Such action is inherent in the very prin- 
ciple of representative government as such govern- 
ment has developed in modern democracies. Even 
amid the more experienced parliaments of Eng- 
land and France — where the oft-repeated echoes of 
chronic international collisions ought to create a 
more accurate sense of international business — 
demagogic motives have inspired with growing 
frequency a clamor against "secret diplomacy." 
Legislators often recklessly sacrifice the international 
interests of their country to base political intrigue, 
party interests, or their personal interests in their 
electoral districts. 

But in the United States 30,000 bills engage the 



* Here we have brilliantly revealed the long thoughts of the 
German Government in fomenting the Sinn Fein rebellion of 
Easter Monday, 1916. 

[105] 



HESITATIONS 

attention of Washington annually, and these bills 
have almost exclusively a political or personal char- 
acter, representing the efforts of individual Congress- 
men to please their districts. 

" Thus, nearly 20,000 are bills which place selected 
individuals on the national pension lists. About 
5,000 provide for dredging creeks, rivers, and harbors. 
A mass of others grant public buildings to com- 
munities that do not need them. Others appro- 
priate Federal money for the payment of claims- 
many illusory in character — against the Government. 
Properly all these matters are no legitimate concern 
of Congress — they are merely details of adminis- 
tration which the executive departments should 
attend to. This practice, however, has developed 
in Congress a demoralizing tendency to pander to 
localities. Almost any group that makes a noise 
can attract a Congressman's attention, A half- 
dozen telegrams and a few letters will scare the 
average Congressman. 

"Nearly every Congressional district, except those 
[ 106] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

in the South, has a considerable proportion of 
German-Americans. Some possess far more than 
others; there are few, however, that do not contain 
a certain proportion. According to the prevailing 
system, these voters have personal claims upon their 
representatives. Since the day Congress came to- 
gether last December, this German element has 
conducted an active propaganda. More accurately 
expressed, perhaps, a propaganda has been con- 
ducted in its name, for there is yet no reason to 
assume that the millions of thrifty and law-abiding 
Germans in this country, the mass of whom have 
testified to their patriotism on critical occasions, 
openly champion the cause of Germany against the 
United States. There is, however, a professional 
element that is unpatriotically active. It seeks to 
compel our Government to abandon neutrality in 
the interests of the German Empire. It has flooded 
Congress with petitions demanding an embargo on 
the shipment of munitions. It openly announces 
its intention to 'swing the German vote' against 
[ 107] 



HESITATIONS 

President Wilson in the coming campaign. Its 
main headquarters, the German-American Alliance, 
is avowedly a political organization. 

" Its spokesmen denounce the President in vulgar 
language; its emissaries are actively summoning 
strength for next fall's election; its journalistic 
advocates are abusing America and its leading public 
men in a style that, in a less open-minded nation, 
would cause public disorder. These gentlemen 
began to assail Congressmen as soon as the question 
of armed merchantmen became an active one. The 
usual ' back fires,' in the shape of telegrams, letters, 
and personal visits, began to frighten the Federal 
legislators. An investigation — 1 have myself seen 
specimens of these communications — usually dis- 
closed an identity of phrasing and authorship which 
indicated that the campaign, though active, rep- 
resented no great spontaneity. 1 1 was manufactured 
public opinion of the most diaphanous kind. Yet it 
had its influence. Indeed, affected by this as well 

as by their general attitude of accommodation 
[io8] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

toward constituents, the mass of Congressmen gave 
way. The German-American vote, in their eyes, 
now took on stupendous proportions. Through the 
majority leaders Congress formally notified the 
President that it overwhelmingly disapproved his 
German policy. An inexperienced Texan Congress- 
man, hitherto unknown to fame, suddenly found 
himself an international figure. He had introduced 
a resolution which essentially denounced the Presi- 
dent's policy, formally abandoned the principles of 
international law and humanity, and enrolled the 
representatives of the American people on the side 
of Germany. The question presented by the Wash- 
ington situation was simply this : does the American 
Congress stand with their President or the Kaiser? 
. . . The wave of indignation that swelled from 
all parts of the country disclosed that Congress 
was opposing the finest instincts of the people. Mr. 
Wilson accepted the Congressional challenge. He 
demanded that the members stand up and take 
their side, either with him or with the enemies of 
[ 109 ] 



HESITATIONS 

the country. The leaders — Messrs. Kern, Clark, 
Kitchin — had said that two-thirds of the members 
of both chambers would vote against him. 'Very 
well,' answered Mr. Wilson, 'stand up like men and 
do it.' For himself he was prepared to meet the 
test. There was every reason why Mr. Wilson 
could afford to take this stand. The fact that he 
spoke for at least ninety million Americans made his 
strength irresistible. Not a few professional agita- 
tors, but the hearty demands of an outraged Amer- 
ican public — these were the people the President was 
hearing from. Evidently the Executive had suf- 
ficient authority for 'encroaching' on the preroga- 
tives of the legislature."* 

The anonymous and well-informed author of 
this article adds: "This latest Congressional episode 
is not one that the American people can particularly ^ 
rejoice in. It has served one great purpose, however, 
in emphasizing once more the importance of cen- 
tralized leadership in our governmental system. 

*See article, "Shall We Have Responsible Government?" — 
World's Work, May, 1916. 

[IIO] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

Fortunately we had a President who fully understood 

the dignity and responsibility of his office; only 

if 

Mr. Wilson's supreme intelligence, however, saved ^ 
us from a great national calamity. Under less com- 
manding leadership the Nation would have found 
itself insulted and disregarded, and a situation 
would have rapidly developed that must have in- 
evitably ended in war. When the history of these 
times is written Mr. Wilson's heroic stand will be 
seen in the full perspective as perhaps the one event 
that most successfully made for peace." 

Yes, there can be no doubt as to the fineness 
and the remarkable consequences of Mr. Wilson's 
triumph. Here, at last, he had shown political 
courage and real leadership — though the courage 
had been confined to mastering unruly Chambers 
that threatened his executive will, and wounded 
his amour propre — and he had, as the writer just 
quoted says, " saved us from a great national calam- 
ity." But to this writer who talks of the "perspec- 
tives of history" it may be pertinent to observe that 
[in] 



HESITATIONS 

Mr. Wilson's "heroic stand" would not have been 
needed if, at the outset of the war, he had adopted a 
poHcy which would have peopled the "perspectives 
of history" with quite other possibilities of action. 
The quickest way, perhaps, to make this point clear 
is to ask the reader to recall for a moment the in- 
cidents of the Sinn Fein rebellion in Dublin in May, 
1 916, in connection with the history of the relations 
between Ireland and England during the last three 
or four years, and, holding that whole episode clear 
in his mind, to reread the above passage with the 
following slight changes: 

This latest British Imperial episode is not one 
that the English people can particularly rejoice in. 
It has served one great purpose, however, in empha- 
sizing once more the importance of centralized 
leadership in the British governmental system. 
Fortunately we had a Prime Minister who fully 
understood the dignity and responsibility of his 
office; only Mr. Asquith's supreme intelligence^ 
however, saved us from a great national calamity. 
Under less commanding leadership the Nation would 
have found itself insulted and disregarded, and a 

[112] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

situation would have rapidly developed that must 
have inevitably ended in war. When the history 
of these times is written Mr. Asquith's heroic stand 
will be seen in the full perspective as perhaps the one 
event that most successfully made for peace. 



But let it be frankly granted that Mr. Wilson, 
who stood for a "neutrality" of a very peculiar 
form, and whose constant aim was to keep the 
United States out of war, won in the United States' 
Congress a remarkable provisional victory. He 
appeared to have lopped from the Pan-German 
octopus some of its most powerful tentacles—those 
that it had flung out over vast regions of American 
territory. He thus secured the authority he needed 
to claim for the second time the right of leading 
the American people. Fourteen months after his 
"strict accountability" Note to Germany, on April 
19, 1916, the President came before Congress just 
after the destruction of the French cross-channel 
steamer Sussex, and read a statement explaining 
why he had just informed Germany that she must im- 
[ii3l 



HESITATIONS 

mediately abandon her methods of warfare against 
passenger and freight-carrying vessels, or prepare 
for complete severance of diplomatic relations: 

"... The Government of the United States 
has been very patient. At every stage of this dis- 
tressing experience of tragedy after tragedy in 
which its own citizens were involved, it has sought 
to be restrained from any extreme course of action 
or of protest by a thoughtful consideration of the 
extraordinary circumstances of this unprecedented 
war, and actuated in all that it said or did by the 
sentiments of genuine friendship which the people 
of the United States have always entertained and 
continue to entertain toward the German nation. 
It has of course accepted the successive explana- 
tions and assurances of the German Imperial Gov- 
ernment as given in entire sincerity and good faith, 
and has hoped, even against hope, that it would 
prove to be possible for the German Government so 
to order and control the acts of its naval com- 
manders as to square its policy with the principles 
of humanity as embodied in the law of nations. It 
has been willing to wait until the significance of the 
facts became absolutely unmistakable and suscept- 
ible of but one interpretation. 

[114] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

"That point has now unhappily been reached. 
The facts are susceptible of but one interpretation. 
The Imperial German Government has been unable 
to put any limits or restraints upon its warfare 
against either freight or passenger ships. It has, 
therefore, become painfully evident that the posi- 
tion which this Government took at the very outset 
is inevitable, namely, that the use of submarines 
for the destruction of an enemy's commerce is of 
necessity, because of the very character of the vessels 
employed and the very methods of attack which 
their employment of course involves, incompatible 
with the principles of humanity, the long established 
and incontrovertible rights of neutrals, and the 
sacred immunities of noncombatants. 

" I have deemed it my duty, therefore, to say to 
the Imperial German Government that if it is still 
its purpose to prosecute relentless and indiscriminate 
warfare against vessels of commerce by the use of 
submarines, notwithstanding the now demonstrated 
impossibility of conducting that warfare in accord- 
ance with what the Government of the United 
States must consider the sacred and indisputable 
rules of international law and the universally rec- 
ognized dictates of humanity, the Government of 
the United States is at last forced to the conclusion 
that there is but one course it can pursue; and that 

[115] 



HESITATIONS 

unless the Imperial German Government should 
now immediately declare and effect an abandon- 
ment of its present methods of warfare against 
passenger and freight-carrying vessels, this Govern- 
ment can have no choice but to sever diplomatic 
relations with the government of the German Em- 
pire altogether. 

"This decision I have arrived at with the keenest 
regret; the possibility of the action contemplated I 
am sure all thoughtful Americans will look forward 
to with unaffected reluctance. But we cannot 
forget that we are in some sort and by the force of 
circumstances the responsible spokesman of the 
rights of humanity, and that we cannot remain 
silent while those rights seem in process of being 
swept utterly away in the maelstrom of this terrible 
war. We owe it to a due regard for our own rights 
as a nation, to our sense of duty as a representative 
of the rights of neutrals the world over, and to a 
just conception of the rights of mankind to take this 
stand now with the utmost solemnity and firmness. 

" I have taken it, and taken it in the confidence 
that it will meet with your approval and support. 
All sober-minded men must unite in hoping that the 
Imperial German Government, which has in other 
circumstances stood as the champion of all that we 
are now contending for in the interest of humanity, 

[ii6] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

may recognize the justice of our demands and meet 
them in the spirit in which they are made." 



The new Note was an ultimatum, and was taken 
as such. On May 4th, after a general war council 
of the Empire, the German Government replied to 
the American Government that orders had been 
given to German naval commanders to the eflFect 
that no merchant ships would be sunk, either 
within or without the naval "war zone," except in 
conformity with the general regulations of inter- 
national law — unless such ships attempted to escape 
or to offer resistance. Germany, however, in the 
same breath made other more characteristic res- 
ervations. She appealed once again to the com- 
passion of the United States, was not Germany the 
piteous victim of an unlawful blockade by the 
Allies, and was not "Freedom of the Seas" the 
common ideal of the United States and Germany 
against the world wide naval tyranny of Britain, 
and had not Germany twice proved to the world 
[117] 



HESITATIONS 

within the last few months that she was ready for 
an honorable peace and that it was not she who was 
keeping the warclouds rolHng? 

"The German Government does not doubt that 
the Government of the United States will now de- 
mand and insist that the British Government hence- 
forth observes the rules of international law uni- 
versally recognized before the war and as they are 
formulated in the Note presented by the Govern- 
ment of the United States to the British Govern- 
ment on December 28, 19 14. 

" In the event of the negotiations undertaken by 
the Government of the United States being unable 
to attain the object which it desires, namely, to see 
the laws of humanity respected by all the belligerent 
nations, the German Government will consider the 
new situation, in regard to which it must reserve to 
itself complete liberty of decision." 

Always the same crass devices, the same insulting 
presumption of an inevitable American gullibility, 
the same application of the monstrous diplomatic 
traditions and blackmailing system of the Prussia 
of Frederick "the Great," and of Bismarck, which 
[n8] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

the frank Bernhardi had expounded in "Germany 
and the Next War": 

"Alliances in which each contracting party has 
different interests will never hold good under all 
conditions, and therefore cannot represent a perman- 
ent political system. 

" ' There is no alliance or agreement in the world 
that can be regarded as effective if it is not fastened 
by the bond of the common and reciprocal interests ; 
if in any treaty the advantage is all on one side and 
the other gets nothing, this disproportion destroys 
the obligation'; These are the words of Frederick 
the Great, our foremost political teacher, pace Bis- 
marck. 

"There must be no self-deception on the point 
that political arrangements have only a qualified 
value, that they are always concluded with a tacit 
reservation. Every treaty of alliance presupposes 
the rehus sic stantibus; for since it must satisfy the 
interests of each contracting party, it clearly can 
only hold as long as those interests are really bene- 
fited. . . . Nothing can compel a State to act 
counter to its own interests." 

Thus Mr. Wilson's diplomatic triumph consisted 
solely in the extraction from Germany of promises 
[ 119] 



HESITATIONS 

of provisional good behavior, so long as such con- 
duct shall suit Germany's interests. In reality 
its exact significance became visible only if inter- 
preted in connection with the gigantic events then 
taking place in France, where, in one of the decisive 
battles of the world, Frenchmen were holding at 
bay the armies of the Crown Prince at Verdun, and 
inflicting so smashing a blow on the morale of the 
German rulers and the German people that William 
1 1 had to cower before the uplifted fmger of Prince 
von Billow, whom he detests, and seek at last to 
follow the advice of those who were urging him to 
prepare the readjustments of a future based on the 
certainty of Germany's irrevocable defeat. 

Meanwhile the attitude of Germany had become 
so docile that it was legitimate to wonder whether 
Verdun even provided a perfect key to the enigma 
of Mr. Wilson's diplomatic victory. The German 
Ambassador at Washington sent out a circular 
to the German Consuls, advising Germans in 
America to observe scrupulously the laws of the 
[ 120] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

United States(!), a singular form of what may be 
called ostrich diplomacy, in view of the multi- 
tudinous proofs of the action of the entire staff of 
the German Embassy in organizing crime and 
sedition on American territory. The Von Papens 
and the Von I gels had been banished or arrested, 
but the arch-conspirator still remained at large, 
and he could still manoeuvre in order to resuscitate 
in the President's Pharaonic mind the old fixed idea 
of mediation. Who else, in fact, could now save 
Germany? The Pope and the President — even the 
President in spite of his "diplomatic success" — 
were surely not altogether satisfied with the role 
they had played during the war. Germany was 
ready to dictate to them a finer part. There is 
nothing she enjoys more than being diplomatic 
prompter on the stage of the world. Chronic 
meddling in the affairs of her neighbors had been 
her secular way. Her sole part now was to whisper 
the denouement of the sublime Tragedy in which 
she was playing a part that no longer suited her. 

[121] 



HESITATIONS 

On the 20th of May, President Wilson went down 
to North CaroHna, and after a tribute to the achieve- 
ments of American democracy — which, he said, 
maizes American hfe "a. sort of prophetic sample 
of mankind" — he remarked, in the spirit of the 
French professor's beautiful thought, "The Land 
Where Hatred Expires": 

Does it not interest you that America has run 
before the rest of the world in the making of this 
great human experiment, and is it not a sign of the 
dawn of a new age that the one thing whereupon 
the world is about to fall back is the moral judgment 
of mankind? Lots would like to think that the 
spirit of this occasion — the 141st anniversary of 
the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence — 
could be expressed if we imagined ourselves lifting 
some sacred emblem of counsel and of peace, of 
accommodative and righteous judgment, before the 
nations of the world, and reminding them of a passage 
of Scripture: 'After the wind, after the earthquake, 
after the fire the still small voice of humanity.' 

And the President proceeded to show that he con- 
sidered the war had come to a deadlock! The war, 
[ 122] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

he said, was due to a clash of national standards, 
traditions, and poHtics, and . . . "those are 
things that in contact with each other do not make 
much progress. When you cannot overcome you 
must take counsel."* 

The quadrennial consultation of the American 
people for the election of a Leader was at hand. Did 
Mr. Wilson hope to rally, at the eleventh hour, the 
bands mobilized by the Pan-German conspirators 
over whom he had won such a victory of amour 
propre in his famous clash with Congress? Was he 
willing to let that battle be a bygone, now that he 
had also to his credit a greater victory still, the 
apparent victory over the Kaiser, whom, as he 
jubilantly reminded a company of journalists in 
Washington a few days before, he had resolutely 
"spanked"? Had he made, in his mind's neu- 
trality, some unholy pact with urgent political 
calculations, by which the sympathy of the German 
vote was to be purchased in return for American 



'Washington Correspondence of the Times, May 23, 1916. 
[123] 



HESITATIONS 
overtures and manoeuvres for the restoration of 
peace? There is no keener politician in the Demo- 
cratic party than the distinguished American Am- 
bassador at BerHn, who had spent several days at 
German headquarters when the Council of War was 
deliberating over the tenor of the reply to be sent 
to America's ultimatum. Was the Kaiser ready for 
any and every humiliation in order to keep "his^^^^ 
friend Roosevelt" out of office? Idle speculations 
these. All that can be affirmed, as an historical 
fact, is that Mr. Wilson, was now again greatly 
disappointing those at home and abroad who re- 
called his remarkable confession as to the "many 
things and many conditions" he had learned and 
noted during a year of war, and recalled as well his 
Annual Address of December 7, 1915. They had 
naively supposed that he had learned the really 
essential "things," to wit, that America had, after 
all, profoundly "to do" with what he euphemistic- 
ally called "the present quarrel"; that mediation 
on the part of America had always been absurd, 
[ 124] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

but that it was a proposal particularly odious on 
the part of a man who was capable of informing 
the world that "the quarrel" had dragged those 
who were engaged in it so far that they "had lost 
all sense of responsibility," had, in a word, "gone so 
mad that really it would be well to have nothing 
to do with them." They thought that the President 
had learned at last that the war was not so much 
a clash of national standards as a fight to a finish, 
persisted in by a group of lucid and chivalrous 
peoples resolved to defend the cause of Right and 
Civilization against the onslaughts of a barbarous 
nation; that by his own inaction at the fitting time 
the prestige of the United States, like the prestige 
of Greece, had received a blow from which it would 
take years to recover; that, finally, German con- 
spiracy was still rampant on American soil, and 
that the United States had no time to lose if she 
would become not merely a great nation, but even 
a nation at all, instead of remaining in the embryonic 
form of " a sort of prophetic sample of mankind." 
[125] 



HESITATIONS 

History is bound to be impartial, but its impar- 
tiality should be the impartiality of a tribunal. 
The historian is not responsible for the facts of 
History; his duty is limited to the single obligations 
of not concealing any of the facts and of not stopping 
short of a verdict in the interpretation of the obvious 
meaning of the facts. 

Mr. Wilson's lack of foresight — the consequence 
partially of his ignorance of European affairs, par- 
tially of his political philosophy and of his conception 
of democratic leadership: "the only one source of 
power is the people's will" — entailed for him a long 
series of futile embarrassments which would have 
been spared to a Head of the State of greater com- 
petence, of quick decision, and of real presence of 
mind. By failing to act at the right moment in the 
right way he created for himself that network of 
difficulties in which he rhetorically floundered for 
long months in his efforts to reach the day of doom. 
Election Day, while keeping the American people 
out of war by processes known only to pacifists 
[ 126] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

and humanitarians. Instead of leading the Nation 
he found himself obliged to conform to, and then 
to render effective, the conflicting elements of the 
"popular will." Fortunately the neglect of his 
duty at the outset gave the bureaus of the Wil- 
helmstrasse time to organize, with the assistance 
of the German-American Alliance, their outrageous 
— ^though so useful — campaign against the unity 
of the American nation, their political blackmail 
of the Representatives of the American people, and 
their ancient projects of making America a pro- 
German protectorate. 

It is true that any and every disinterested gesture 
that the United States might make on the side of the 
Allies — even such a gesture as Italy had made — 
might have served the interests of the United States, 
serving as well the interests of the Allies. But 
conduct so comprehensive, so farseeing and in- 
telligent, can be expected of no statesman in this 
imperfect world. Moreover, in this case, it would 
always have been possible to argue that declaration 
[ 127] 



HESITATIONS 

of war, without the justification of other than purely 
rational motives, would have created for the United 
States just that state of civil war which it was 
above all necessary to avoid. Again, an over- 
ingenious historian might argue that no method was 
better adapted than that of Mr. Wilson to the 
exigencies of the case of the United States, since 
nothing short of what really took place, in con- 
sequence of "watchful waiting," could have begun 
to educate the American people as a whole to the 
bitter realities of their national and international 
plight. But Mr. Wilson has himself confessed that 
what he did he did not do " on purpose " ; that when 
he acted as he acted, and failed to act as he failed to 
act, he was all "unware of many things and many 
conditions " that eighteen months of war had revealed 
to him. Accordingly, though his actions were to 
turn out to have been useful, no credit can be given 
to the author. 

If sober statesmanship in Washington required 
that the United States should instantly protest 
[128] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

against the assault on Serbia and the violation of 
the neutrality of Belgium, and should no less in- 
stantly declare its neutrality, it was not so much 
because Humanity is, morally speaking, one, and 
because the separate nations have a common in- 
terest to preserve as many of the civilized ideals 
as may be preserved; it was not even because the 
whole spirit of the Monroe Doctrine dictated, and 
facilitated, such double action ; it was not altogether 
because any other action than that, or any inaction, 
was, in effect, to treat the Hague Conventions as 
worthless scraps of paper, and thereby to destroy 
the faith of the world in the validity of the signature 
of the United States. It was because, before and 
above all — and independently of all motives of his- 
torical tradition or national honor — the vital inter- 
ests of the United States, at home and abroad, and 
perhaps particularly at home, required action that 
would permit it to seize the unexpectedly magni- 
ficent occasion offered by the European War, a 
war that had happily been begun and was being 
[ 129] 



HESITATIONS 
waged in such special conditions, to put its own 
house in order. It was because the opportunity 
had now arisen to liquidate a situation which could 
not be allowed to continue without imperilling all 
that gave to the name of America a special sense 
in the world's annals, a situation which was trans- 
forming the United States into a sort of Austria 
without any Hapsburg Monarch ready to under- 
take its artificial unification; a State which is not a 
Nation, an Empire that is an amalgam of unamal- 
gamated Peoples, a "nation" of which it may be 
said that the only nation that cannot be found there 
is the American nation. It was not even because 
such double action on the part of the United States 
would help to shorten the war, by encouraging the 
other neutral Powers to take the firm and natural 
stand against brigand manners in international re- 
lations. It was because failure to act in this double 
way was obviously to diminish the prestige of the 
United States, to weaken its capacity of action in 
the new post-bellum era when it was to find itself 
[130] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

confronted with a new world in the Pacific, a new 
Australia, a new Japan. 

Thus, a sane statesmanlike conception of the 
world situation, including that of the United States, 
was no less necessary than a temperament capable 
of prompt resolution, for the guidance of the Ameri- 
can people in the critical epoch initiated by Austria's 
ultimatum to Serbia. Leadership of this kind would 
not have been wanting if a statesman of the experi- 
ence of Mr. Roosevelt had been at the White House. 
It is probable that such a statesman would have 
acted in the nick of time in defense not only of 
international law and humanity but of Amer- 
ica's vital interests. The proofs that may be ad- 
duced in support of this assertion are all but 
conclusive. They are not reasons based on Mr. 
Roosevelt's attitude and utterances throughout 
the war. They are based on what is known of 
Mr. Roosevelt's manner and methods when in 
office, his realistic habit of mind, his liking for 
responsibility, his well proven acquaintance with 
[131I 



HESITATIONS 

Europe and with contemporary world move- 
ments. 

The American people are, perhaps, not generally 
aware of Mr. Roosevelt's effective intervention at 
the moment of the Conference of Algeciras, his direct 
intervention with the German Emperor at that 
critical hour, when he played more than once the 
part of a Daniel come to judgment, a diplomatic 
Rhadamanthus who called the HohenzoUern halt. 
One day in March, 1905, William 11, it will be re- 
membered, entered the roadstead at Tangiers. 
Saluted by the French officer in command of the 
Du Chayla, he plied him insistently with the 
question: "You who know these waters well, 
what do you think of the state of the sea? Shall 
1 be able to go ashore?" The weather was calm 
and the French officer saw quite clearly that the 
Emperor hesitated. Two hours later telegrams ar- 
rived from Berlin. Prince von Biilow was in office 
at the Wilhelmstrasse, M. Delcasse at the Quai 
d'Orsay. The German Chancellor had his plan, 
[ 132] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

and he insisted that the Emperor should land and 
make his fateful speech against the policy of France.* 
Yet still the German Emperor hesitated. Once on 
shore he nervously questioned the French charge 
d'affaires, Comte de Cherisey: "Are you sure you 
have received nothing from Paris?" What William 
II wanted, as M. Andre Tardieu pointed out a few 
years later,t at another moment of crisis, was a 
"something or other, a word, an order which would 
permit him to avoid a demonstration that in reality 
he did not approve, which would dispense him from 
the obligation of assuming a personal responsibility, 
which would leave the coast clear for explanations 
less strained than the bitter dialogue prepared by 
his Ministers." Two months later, at the camp of 
Doeberitz, just after the Kronprinz's marriage. 
General de Lacroix was galloping at the Emperor's 
side. Suddenly turning to the French soldier the 

* Prince von Biilow proudly claims, in his book on " German 
Policy" (French edition, p. 103), that this action was taken "on 
his advice." 

1[Le Temps, July 28, 191 1. 

[133] 



HESITATIONS 

Emperor said: "He has gone! Now we shall be 
able to do business together!" It was true. M. 
Delcasse, the French Minister who, during seven 
busy, fateful years, had succeeded in undoing the 
work of Bismarck, had just been driven from office 
by the familiar processes of German political black- 
mail cooperating with the pusillanimity of political 
foes at home. M. Delcasse's enemies had been made 
to believe that his maintenance at the Quai d'Orsay 
would entail an European war. Germany had thus 
run up the red flag of the Morocco difficulty. At 
this juncture, when the international situation was 
most tense, in June, 1905, it was the personal inter- 
vention of Mr. Roosevelt with the Emperor which 
led directly to the Agreement for the Algeciras Con- 
ference. At one moment, as everybody knows, the 
Conference reached a deadlock. It was then, and 
as a last resort, that the Emperor's attention was 
called to a letter which he had written the President 
in the preceding June — and suddenly the deadlock 
was broken. 1 need not give further details, but 
[■34] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

I may add that though, in Paris, in the summer of 
1905, the people at large did not know precisely 
what had been done, they did know in an instinctive 
way that it was owing to Mr. Roosevelt that the 
matter had passed off without bringing war. The 
then Prime Minister, M. Rouvier, was fully aware 
of the facts, and made no secret in private con- 
versation of the gratitude he felt toward the Presi- 
dent of the United States for his prompt, resolute, 
and intelligent action. 

That action was, indeed, determinant, and it was 
characteristic personal action and not political. 
But its remarkable consequences were both political 
and international. The case of Mr. Roosevelt's 
intervention at Algeciras, contrary to the traditional 
narrow conception of the Monroe Doctrine, but in 
full harmony with the spirit of that Doctrine, is 
simply one instance of his manner and methods as a 
statesman. The history of the " mights-have-been " 
is, on the whole, a futile exercise. But in this con- 
nection I can myself testify to the prophetic pene- 
[135] 



HESITATIONS 

tration of Mr. Roosevelt's conception of the Euro- I 

pean situation in the springtime of 1914, just before 

the war; and from what 1 personally know of the 

secret history of the Algeciras Conference, and above 

all of the psychology of the German Emperor, 

I think it probable that if a President such as Mr. 

Roosevelt had been at the head of the United States 

in 1 91 4 he would have intervened so unhesitatingly 

— and perhaps so " unconstitutionally " — in the last 

weeks of July, 1914, by direct reminder to "his 

friend" William 11 that any such illogical corollary 

of the no less illogical assault on Serbia as the viola- 

I 
tion of Belgian neutrality would intimately concern 

Washington, that the Anglo-Russian proposals for a 

Conference might ultimately have been accepted. 

It is true that the German war party was bent on 
bringing matters to a crisis before 1 9 1 7 at the latest. 

"Lack of character" is often due to physical 
flabbiness; it is due even oftener still to lack of 
knowledge, insufficient experience, but whatever the 
cause the consequences are invariably the same. 
[136] 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

It is rare that it is possible to detect in human 
history any relation between a motive and a con- 
sequence. Politics is neither an exact science nor a 
branch of ethics. Politics is a delicate art, dealing 
in a spirit of sociological aesthetics with the shifting 
constituents of human nature, the selfish needs and 
the unselfish aspirations, and combining them for 
opportunist ends in passing syntheses, in which a 
temporary balance of power is secured for human 
society between individual rights and collective duties. 

Common sense has invented the formula, "A 
stitch in time saves nine." "Nine," however, is 
only a symbolic number. Mr. Asquith, Sir E. Grey, 
the Great British Liberal Party, discovered in the 
dark days of August, 1914, that in politics as in , 
morals nine invariably means nine plus. They 
had refused to look facts in the face even when they 
were thrust under their noses by a Lord Roberts 
and other men just as wise. The great Brit- 
ish people is now paying the piper. The case 
of the United States and of its temporary leader, 
[137] 



HESITATIONS 

President Wilson, is almost identical. They were 
not ready for action because they were oblivious 
of all the obvious reahties that certain of us had 
recommended to their attention. President Wilson 
having failed to seize the event, to be the con- ,, 
stitutional guide and prophet of a nation which 
would have followed him any whither, as it follows 
any President who has the gift of leadership, was 
compelled to devise belated methods of saving the 
honor of his country and of conserving its traditions. 
He had failed to utilize the Monroe Doctrine, he 
had ignored the potential application of the Hague 
Conference Treaties. He had thereby given the 
enemies of the United States time to mine American 
soil. The Wilhelmstrasse began its long campaign 
of abuse of American guilelessness, ignorance, 
prejudices, and idealism.* What could be saved? 



*Among the letters found in the possession of the American 
journalist, Mr. James F. J. Archibald, who was arrested by the 
British authorities at Falmouth, were missives from Captain 
von Papen, the German Military Attache at Washington. In 
one of these letters Captain von Papen spoke of the American 
people as "these idiotic Yankees." 

[138] 



1 



ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 

Perhaps "Humanity," whatever Humanity might 
mean. The President began to indite that brilliant 
series of impartial penultimatums to the belligerent 
Powers by which he hoped to convey America's 
resolution to save what still remained out of the 
rack and ruin of international law, while preventing 
extension of the war to the Western Hemisphere, 
and possibly so prolonging these literary exercises 
as to have an unanswered letter still before him 
when the war was over. But the war continued 
longer than he had expected, and the embarrass- 
ments of his own creation loomed more and more 
menacingly. His methods for isolating the United 
States were bringing her closer and closer to the 
maelstrom. The American people had been given 
time, and been given it by their President, for na- 
tional education. Filled with the sense of his re- 
sponsibility, fearful that the whirlwind which he 
himself had loosened might sweep down on us, and 
his Prospero wand no longer avail, he began a cam- 
paign of "preparations," the illogical capriciousness 
[ 139] 



HESITATIONS 

of which startled the country. A stitch in time 
saves nine. Himself the victim of the now enlight- 
ened public opinion of the masses, he finally, at the 
eleventh hour, resolved to act. He came down 
to Congress and he solemnly told the country a 
portion of the truth, what for the moment, at all 
events, was most essential — and he craved their 
support for his inadequate act of energy. 

It is an exceedingly curious chapter of American 
history, a chapter, in fact, altogether unprecedented 
in the annals of the United States, unless we may 
cite as a parallel case, and as a somewhat analogous 
moment, the Administration of Buchanan, who was 
the melancholy great American forerunner of the 
policy of "watchful waiting." He kept the country 
out of war while he himself was in office. But 
after him there befell the horrors that we know. 



[ 140] 



CHAPTER V 

CONSEQUENCES OF THE ACTION OF THE GOVERNMENT 
OF THE UNITED STATES 

The Future Foreign Policy of the United States 

THE President's postponement of useful and 
decisive action at the outbreak of the war, 
his adoption of neutrahty without an ac- 
companying protest against Austria's treatment of 
Serbia and against Germany's assault on Luxembourg 
and Belgium, and his efforts to devise belated 
methods for saving the honor of his country — efforts 
to which he was constrained as a last resort, owing 
to his failure to act in time — were interpretable, it 
has been argued, as part of what he conceived to be 
a larger American policy, a policy which Europe 
had little time to watch, the legitimate Pan-American 
preoccupations of Washington. This is an hy- 
[141] 



HESITATIONS 

pothesis so speciously plausible that it is not sur- 
prising that the more intimate friends of the Presi- 
dent, one above all whose own reputation is inti- 
mately bound up with that of Mr. Wilson, Colonel 
House, the Pere Joseph of the Washington Cabinet, 
should have found it attractive and have sought to 
use it in explanation of American hesitations. On 
February 25, 1916, there appeared in the Journal 
de Geneve an interview with Colonel House. Colonel 
House, after having declared that President Wilson 
was "one of the most luminous and best equipped 
brains in the world," said: 

"Once he has decided on a line of conduct, no 
Power in the world can possibly make him deviate 
from the path he has mapped out for himself. More- 
over, he keeps his own secrets, and he rarely dis- 
closes his plans even to his most intimate friends. 
But you may always be sure that he knows exactly 
what he is about. The best example 1 can give you 
is what has taken place with regard to his Mexican 
policy. . . . 

"Over and above the Mexican question President 
Wilson saw a question infinitely more important 

[ 142] 



CONSEQUENCES 

for the future not only of the United States but also 
of the two Americas. When he became President 
he perceived that all the Republics of Central 
America and of South America felt a deeply rooted 
distrust and even hatred of the United States, a 
distrust that was justified by the imperialistic policy 
of the great Northern Republic. The President 
decided to put an end to this state of things. He 
undertook to prove to the other republics that the 
United States had no craving for an inch of territory 
beyond their own borders, and that they meant 
to respect religiously the political independence and 
the territorial integrity of all the other American 
States. Given such a principle as this, how could 
President Wilson have intervened brutally in the 
internecine quarrels of Mexico? It would have been 
tantamount to destroying for several generations 
every hope of fraternal understanding between the 
Latin Republics and the United States. . . . 

"President Wilson accordingly, with unflinching 
energy and perseverance, devoted himself to the 
task of bringing about the concord which was so 
dear to his heart, and in January last, on the oc- 
casion of the Pan-American Scientific Congress in 
Washington, he was able to proclaim the success of 
this enterprise. In a memorable speech delivered 
on the 6th of January, 191 6, President Wilson was 

[143] 



HESITATIONS 

able to declare that the twenty-one American Re- 
publics were in agreement to cooperate fraternally, 
on the basis of perfect equality, in the economic and 
moral development of the two Americas. The rep- 
resentatives declared it to be their firm intention 
to unite in all circumstances for the maintenance 
of the territorial integrity of each of them, small or 
great. Thereby was realized one of the most im- 
portant points of the foreign policy program that 
President Wilson had drawn up for himself on tak- 
ing office. . . . 

"You may conclude from this that President 
Wilson has perfectly definite ideas as to the role 
which America should play in the present crisis. 
What are those ideas? He is perhaps the only 
one who knows them, but I beg you to believe that 
the President is defending, as he has said so often, 
the superior interests of humanity." 

In presence of such declarations as these it would 
seem to be impossible to avoid a discussion of Mr. 
Wilson's Mexican policy, and of Mr. Wilson's Pan- 
American diplomacy. Colonel House unquestion- 
ably is so far right that those who seek to praise 
Mr. Wilson for his general treatment of American 
[ 144 1 



CONSEQUENCES 

affairs during the Great War would find their task 
facilitated by adopting the view that the President 
of the United States was all along striving to regard 
the war, in spite of its gigantic character and its 
paramount interest for Americans, as subordinate 
in interest to the Pan-American problems in the 
Western Hemisphere. If, to use the mathematical 
expression, he took the World War as a function 
of Pan-American questions; if, however, para- 
doxically, he was saying to himself, "Let us 
make American hay while the storm beats, let us 
work out in the Western Hemisphere a few solid 
equations of plebiscitary diplomacy in the name of 
Humanity; that result, at all events, will be all to 
the good for us and for civilization, and then I shall 
be free to deal with the ' superior interests of human- 
ity' beyond the seas," the historian would have 
provisional explanation of the foreign policy of 
Washington during the Great War. He would 
then have to point out why an idea so interesting 
was bound in its application to lead to results de- 
[145] 



HESITATIONS 

plorable both for "humanity" and for the United 
States. A demonstration of this sort would require 
a minute analysis of the Mexican problem in con- 
nection with the whole Pan-American question. 
It is of subordinate interest in such a book as the 
present one, and 1 prefer to defer it until it may 
find its place in the study on which 1 am now en- 
gaged as to the causes and consequences of the 
Great War. The sole task which 1 have kept 
steadily before me in the present essay is to explain, 
first, the reasons for the peculiar reactions of the 
American Government and the American people 
under the impact following on the criminal aggression 
of Austria and Germany; secondly, the grave con- 
sequences for American prestige and American 
society of the failure of the Government of the United 
States to comprehend the significance of the World 
War, and to act in defense of the vital interests of 
the people, at a moment of national crisis. 

The year 191 6 is of extraordinary gravity for 
the United States. We have entered into our 
[146] 



CONSEQUENCES 

crisis.* At no moment since the " Declaration of In- 
dependence " has the people of the United States been 
in such need of the guidance of a statesman, combining 
the high-mindedness, the elevation of a Washington, 
the commonsense and sturdy character of a Lincoln, 
the astute realism of a Richelieu, as to-day when, 
by the revolution of the years, we finally find our- 
selves somewhat aghast, face to face with the crit- 
ical hour in which we are called upon, whether we 
like it or no, to justify or to reject, amid the comity 
of the nations, all our pretentions to being a peculiar 
people to whom has been vouchsafed a special 
" manifest destiny " of our own. It is by no fault of 
the American people, but we have atrociously 
blundered, and we shall long pay dear for it. We 
have lost the respect of the nations, the same respect 
that Greece has lost, without being able to cite, as 



*It is almost a quarter of a century since I wrote (see "Pa- 
triotism and Science," p. 89, Boston, 1893): "The responsibility 
of vindicating democracy will be upon the next half-century of 
American men. They think their raison d'etre is proved. Vain 
beating of the eagle wings. The second historical era of the 
world is passing into its crisis. . . ." 

[•47] 



HESITATIONS 

Greece can cite, any attenuating circumstances. 
We have ceased to "retain unabated the spirit that 
has inspired us throughout the Hfe of our Govern- 
ment." It is all the more necessary that we should 
lose no time in returning for inspiration to our veri- 
table traditions. 

The Doctrine of Monroe is of an admirable and 
pacific suggestion for the present hour. Nineteen 
hundred and sixteen is engaged in problems which 
in many respects resemble those of 1815 to 1823. 
To-day, as then, the struggle, as Madison wrote to 
Jefferson, is between liberty and despotism, be- 
tween arbitrary power and national independence, 
between Americanism and a revived form of "law- 
less Alliance calling itself Holy," which, in the form 
of a Pan-German banyan tree, has already rooted 
itself over vast stretches of American soil. 

The remark with which I ended my " Problems of 
Power" in 191 3 is to-day more opportune than ever: 

Franco-Latin cooperation in South America, 
Anglo-American cooperation in the Islands and on 
[148] 



CONSEQUENCES 

the high seas of the Pacific; a solemn Franco-Anglo- 
American pact for the peace of the world: such are 
the potential realities which may already be descried 
from the heights above Culebra. 

That some such dream was not merely realizable, 
but bound to materialize within a brief period was 
my apparently audacious divination some eighteen 
months before the tragic August of 191 4. The 
Great World War which we are now witnessing has, 
I believe, brought its realization nearer. I can only 
add that the Force of Things, during the march of 
the Great World War, has tended emphatically to 
corroborate this view. 

The idea which I recommended to the attention 
of Washington in 191 3 has had the fortune to meet 
with the approval of Dr. Charles W. Eliot, the 
President Emeritus of Harvard. On March 12, 
1916, the New York Times contained a remarkable 
discussion by him of the world situation, written 
at Bermuda, one of the pivots of the world politics 
of the future. In this message President Eliot 
[ 149] 



HESITATIONS 

Stated the incontestable fact that the great majority 
of the American people "sympathize with and cor- 
dially approve all the desires or objects of Russia, 
Great Britain, France, and Italy, and condemn with 
equal decision the desires of Germany and Austria- 
Hungary; for the desires of the four Entente Allies 
are consistent with the ideals of freedom, justice, 
and brotherhood which all true Americans cherish, 
and the desires or aims of Germany and Austria- 
Hungary are not." Moreover, Americans, he added, 
with few exceptions, detest militarism, with its 
necessary accompaniment, conscription and com- 
petitive arming, and would therefore welcome 
international agreements for diminishing these 
evils in Europe hereafter. "They perceive, too, 
that . . . the Americans are not so detached 
from Europe and Asia as they were thirty or even 
ten years ago, and that Washington's wise advice 
against entangling alliances is by no means as ap- 
plicable to American needs and interests to-day as 
it was when it was uttered." 
[>50j 



CONSEQUENCES 

What is President Eliot's conclusion? He urges 
that it is undoubtedly the interest of the Americans 
to protect themselves at all costs from invasion by 
Germany. "The promptest, surest, and most 
advantageous method of accomplishing that result 
is entrance by the United States into a permanent 
offensive and defensive alliance with Great Britain 
and France to maintain the freedom of the seas for 
these Allies under all circumstances, and to oppose 
attack by sea on any one of them. . . . Ger- 
many, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey will not be 
admissible to this new alliance, because they so 
easily absolve themselves from keeping their word." 

This commonsense, statesmanlike proposal of 
Doctor Eliot is the exact opposite of the project 
which — for motives that are not entirely clear, but 
some of which are obvious, namely the wish, on 
the eve of the Presidential elections, to command 
the influence of the still powerful ex-colleague of the 
President, the ex-Secretary of State, Mr. Bryan, 
who immediately on his resigning office harangued 



HESITATIONS 

25,000 German-Americans and Clan na Gael Irish 
in Madison Square, New York, in language of the 
most peace-sentiment fustian — Mr. Wilson ex- 
pounded at Washington on May 27, 19 16, in a care- 
fully prepared speech before the so-called " League to 
Enforce Peace." Mr. Wilson began by declaring: 
"With the causes and objects of this Great War we 
are not concerned. The obscure fountains from 
which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are 
not interested to search for or to explore." This 
was an utterance annihilating all the moral values 
hitherto held precious by American idealism, but 
it was quite the sort of logical Pharaonic comment 
to be expected of the man who had forgotten to 
take the step required for the defence of the political 
and national interests of the American people. 
Mr. Wilson, thereupon, sought to argue that, in- 
asmuch as the real cause of the war was secret di- 
plomacy ( !), the great nations of the world must reach 
"some sort of agreement as to what they hold to be 
fundamental to their common interest, and as to 
[152] 



CONSEQUENCES 

some feasible method of acting in concert when 
any nation, or group of nations, seeks to disturb 
these fundamental things." "The principle of 
public right," he added, "must henceforth take 
precedence over the individual interests of partic- 
ular nations" — as if those "principles of public 
right" had not been the very principles which the 
Allies, rising up in their righteous indignation against 
brutal Prussian aggression, had been for long years 
striving to introduce into international affairs; as 
if there were any other practical way of bringing 
in the reign of Public Law than by a frank choice 
between the belligerents in the present war, and a 
consequent demand that they who had arbitrarily 
and wantonly sought to wreck civilization should 
be summoned before the bar of the universal con- 
science and justly punished! Mr. Wilson then laid 
it down as "the passionate conviction of America" 
that "every people has the right to choose the 
sovereignty under which they shall live like other 
nations," but he neglected to explain why he had 
[153I 



HESITATIONS 

not proclaimed this principle when the Austrians 
were bombarding Belgrade and the Germans were 
sacking Louvain. And, these things said, he came 
to the point which was the object of his speech: 

So sincerely do we believe in these things that I 
am sure 1 speak the mind and wish of the people of 
America when I say that the United States is willing 
to become a partner in any feasible association of 
nations, formed in order to realize these objects and 
to make them secure against violation. There is 
nothing the United States wants for itself that any 
other nation has. We are willing, on the contrary, 
to limit ourselves, along with them, to the prescribed 
course of duty and respect for the rights of others 
which will check any selfish passion of our own as it 
will check any aggressive impulse of theirs. If it 
should ever be our privilege to suggest or initiate 
a movement for peace among the nations now at 
war, I am sure the people of the United States 
would wish their Government to move along these 
lines: 

1. Such a settlement with regard to their own 
immediate interests as the belligerents may agree 
upon. We have nothing material of any kind to 
ask for ourselves and are quite aware that we are 

(154] 



CONSEQUENCES 

in no sense or degree parties to the present quarrel. 
Our interest is only in peace and its future guarantees. 
2. A universal association of nations to maintain 
inviolate the security of the highway of the seas 
for the common, unhindered use of all the nations 
of the world, and to prevent any war begun either 
contrary to treaty covenants or without warning 
and full submission of the cause to the opinion of 
the world — a virtual guarantee of territorial integrity 
and political independence. 



"A universal association of nations . . .!" 
Such, then, is the unstatesmanlike dream of the K 
responsible head of one of the foremost States of 
the world, almost two years after the outbreak of a 
war which is being waged in conditions that stultify 
every possible pretext for harboring such a danger- 
ous Utopia. Mr. Wilson hereby resuscitated, with 
even less sense of opportuneness than President 
Taft, a slightly altered version of the famous pro- 
posals of his predecessor in 191 1, relative to the 
settlement of "matters of national honor" by Courts 
of Arbitration. These proposals, which were wel- 
[155] 



HESITATIONS 

corned on March 13, 19 11, by Sir Edward Grey, as 
"bold and courageous words," worked such sad 
havoc in England during the two years preceding 
the Great War that their consequences became one 
of the immediate causes of Germany's decision to 
carry out her plans of universal domination without 
delay. At the outbreak of the war President 
Nicholas Murray Butler, of the University of Co- 
lumbia, predicted that the war would develop a 
"tendency toward a United States of Europe,"* 
and some weeks later he suggested that Europe 
might learn certain lessons from the history of the 
American federal system, in order "to find some 
method after the war of so organizing as to develop 
a common will." Mr. Wilson's Bryanitic sug- 
gestions bear a curious family likeness with such 
deplorably uncritical comments on current world 
events. Even more remarkable, however, is the 



* See "The United States as a World Power": an interview with 
Nicholas Murray Butler by Edward Marshall, reprinted from 
the New York Times, of May 16, 191 5. 

I 156] 



CONSEQUENCES 

parallel between the ideas of Mr. Wilson and the tele- 
gram published in the Abend of Vienna by its Berlin 
correspondent, as reported by Count Reventlow: 

I am assured by the authoritative quarter of the 
accuracy of the following interpretation of those 
parts of the Imperial Chancellor's conversation (i. e., 
with Mr. Von Wiegand) which concern Germany's 
readiness for peace negotiations: 

1 . Germany rejects as not open to discussion Sir 
Edward Grey's expressed demand {sic) that the 
preparation of peace negotiations shall be made 
dependent upon a mediation proposal which takes 
into account the guilty responsibility for the out- 
break of war. On the one hand, the question has 
been sufficiently illuminated, and, on the other 
hand, the Imperial Chancellor has arrived at the 
firm conviction that such discussion can in no 
circumstances yield a positive result. The Imperial 
Chancellor, therefore, as he indicated, does not 
intend to return to this point, 

2. The German Government must very energetic- 
ally reject any attempt by the enemy to drag in- 
ternal German affairs into discussion by way of the 
peace conference, or to secure any influence with 
regard to them. 

[157 1 



HESITATIONS 

3. Germany is ready for peace. But the only 
basis for negotiations is the present mihtary situ- 
ation. Negotiations, whether they come early or 
late, can have a prospect of success only if they 
start from the basis of the military situation existing 
at the time. Hence, it is obvious that Germany's 
peace conditions will be altered in accordance with 
the further development of the military situation.* 

It appears from this inspired interpretation of 
Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg's views in the spring- 
time of 1916, that the German Chancellor is no less 
indifferent than Mr. Wilson to all questions or con- 
siderations that concern " the guilty responsibility for 
the outbreak of the war." Fortunately for the honor 
of the vast majority of the American people such 
Pontius Pilate impartiality has long ceased to be — if, 
indeed, it ever was — a faithful echo of the popular will. 
It is President Eliot and not President Wilson who is 
now defending American prestige beyond the seas. 

"A universal association of nations" is an ab- 
surdity. It ignores very nearly all the data of the 



*See the Times, May 29, 1916. 

[158] 



CONSEQUENCES 

problem which the winsome phrase was lightly 
formulated to solve. On the other hand, some such 
alliance as has been indicated with the nations 
that are now defending Right and Public Law is 
one of those necessities which have been, at every 
moment of history, the godsend of statesmen. ]/^ 
It is the real truth that England has been for one 
hundred years our sleeping partner in international 
business. We have had misunderstandings. Alien 
influences, Fenian or Prussian, have striven in vain 
to create a breach between us. "There were mo- 
ments," as Lord Bryce has put it,* "when the stiff 
and frigid attitude of the British Foreign Secretary 
exasperated the American Negotiators, or when a 
demagogic Secretary of State at Washington tried 
by a bullying tone to win credit as the patriotic 
champion of national causes." Yet naught has 
availed to sunder the branches of the English- 
speaking race. The Monroe Doctrine, rightly 



*"The British Empire and the United States," by William 
Archibald Dunning; Introduction by James Bryce, Scribner, p. 
XXXVII. 

[159] 



HESITATIONS 

understood, was in reality the broad rock base of an 
alliance between England and the United States 
for the defence of common ideals of freedom. Its 
logical corollary is a compact for the peace of the 
world. And such a compact would be so incomplete 
as to be of vain application if it did not include, at 
least, that glorious France, which is not only, as 
Mistral called it, "le chevalier de la civilization 
Latine," but is also the knight-errant of Humanity. 
The author of "The Day of the Saxon" was not 
exaggerating when he said, before the war: " In the 
preservation of the British Empire, rather than in 
the Doctrine of Monroe, is to be found the basis 
of the security of the American nations." Even 
at this hour the British and the French fleets, whose 
action has now and then so irritated the merchants 
of the two Americas as to have warranted Wash- 
ington's entering for form's sake a mild protest, are 
fighting critical world battles on which depends the 
peaceful development of American interests north 
and south of Panama and in the Pacific for the 
[ i6o] 



CONSEQUENCES 

next fifty years. Such is the ignorance of the United 
States of international conditions that hardly any 
American had the slightest notion, for instance, of 
the fact that if, during the present war, England's 
fleet had not preserved the British Islands virtually 
inviolate, while maintaining real "freedom of the 
seas," and demonstrating the vital importance of 
sea power, humiliation of the United States would 
have ensued, and no "neutrality" would have been 
possible for our country. 

These are facts which, while they impose upon us 
the necessity of creating for ourselves a systematic 
and methodical world policy, supported on the 
fleet and army of our policy, will enable us, in de- 
fensive cooperation with the two other great liberal 
Powers of the world, to secure the inevitable read- 
justments of the immediate future, while giving us 
the time and the taste to become a nation. Only 
thus shall we be able without friction and for peace- 
ful ends to deal completely with the vast problem 
that confronts us both within and beyond our 
[i6i] 



HESITATIONS 

shores. We are masters not only of the Panama 
Canal but of Guam, Kiska, Honolulu; but we are 
no longer dominant in the waters of Samoa. We 
are the Protectors of Central America and the 
Caribbean; but we are, in spite of the Pan-American 
banqueters, the potential rival of the South American 
Great Powers, and we are now the forlorn cham- 
pions of the Open Door in Asia. At the same time 
we are, as President Wilson has said, momentarily 
"at peace with all the world." Let us not, by any 
"sin of omission" fail to take the precautions that 
will suffer us honorably to remain "at peace with all 
the world," and to make ready for the economic 
clash between Asia and the West. 

Am I hinting at the need of a revolution? I have 
no fear of the word, for I fear other things more. 
No great nation can afford to be forgetful of the 
maxim of Spinoza: "Liberty or strength of soul are 
the virtues of private persons; the virtue of the 
State is security." People that do not want to be- 
lieve what they believe are sure to end by believing 
[ 162 ] 

f^ RD-94 



CONSEQUENCES 

what they want to believe. This means that the 
people who have a tendency to believe what they 
want to believe are they who hesitate to look facts 
in the face. Whatever the experimental effort 
of this or that political party in the United States of 
North America to shirk national responsibility, to 
thwart the Force of things, the good sense of the 
people of our country will eventually insist on lift- 
ing national interests out of the reach of party 
politics. There is a famous phrase of Gambetta 
at Lille: "Quand la France aura entendu sa voix 
souveraine, il faudra se soumettre ou se demettre." 
When, completely alive to the positive realities 
which, whether we like it or no, are to determine 
the national policy of our country, we Americans 
"give expression to our sovereign will," any political 
party — Democratic, Progressive, or Republican — 
which fails to listen, "will either have to become 
resigned or to resign." 

THE END 

[163] 







THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
GARDEN CITY N. Y. 



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